Top 99 Quotes About Writers Reading
#1. You know, you hear about these writers reading 'Lolita' at 12. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher.
Susan Barker
#2. Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.
Will Eisner
#3. I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone.
Shannon Celebi
#4. You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
Nick Hornby
#5. Some writers like to work in other places like coffee shops, but I can't - I'd end up people-watching. And if I were at a bookstore, I'd be reading. Sometimes I have some music on, but usually I like it quiet.
Julie Kagawa
#6. Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.
Rebecca Solnit
#7. Reading had always been another world for him. Not an escape, since he rarely sought escape ... writers had to confront the world if they were going to observe it accurately ... but another world nonetheless. One filled with powerful voices relaying even more powerful thoughts.
Dan Simmons
#9. I grew up reading the 'Village Voice' and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the 'Voice' right after college.
Colson Whitehead
#10. If you can read & write then the opportunities are endless, if you just believe in yourself then anything is possible, you can become anyone and do anything, what's more is, you can take others with you!
Philip L. Moore
#11. There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.
Kurt Vonnegut
#12. I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.
Rachel Kushner
#13. Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.
Jennifer Echols
#14. I was reading all these male writers who were doing wild and wonderful things. It gave me permission to experiment.
Sandra Cisneros
#15. I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.
Andrea Bocelli
#16. A writer's uniqueness glows and transforms the heart and the soul of a reader.
A.D. Posey
#17. Read different to think differently; world is already into rat race.
Aman Jassal
#18. Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
Cornelia Funke
#19. You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.
Jean M. Auel
#20. Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
#21. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.
Diane Setterfield
#22. When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#23. She felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
Alan Bennett
#24. I know many writers who say that the memory of reading fairy tales is their first, and sometimes only, memory of rapture. I hope that this unpredictable, intense collection inspires you to read fairy tales-and then to read them again.
Kate Bernheimer
#25. The mind, relaxing into needful sport, Should turn to writers of an abler sort, Whose wit well managed, and whose classic style, Give truth a lustre, and make wisdom smile.
William Cowper
#26. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds
Niall Williams
#27. It's remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable.
Brandt Legg
#28. Reading opens up other pockets of the mind.
A.D. Posey
#29. If you write without reading, you will certainly have too many books without readers.
M.F. Moonzajer
#30. The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.
Robert Galbraith
#31. My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
Wole Soyinka
#32. Writers and musicians know well the importance of extensive reading for successful writing or extensive listening for musical composition. Likewise, visual artists ... understand that successful artistic creativity depends upon extensive visual exposure.
Paul Laseau
#33. Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.
Pamela Sargent
#34. Reading while I'm writing ideally inspires my competitive side. When I read great writers, I want to be a better writer.
Amity Gaige
#35. The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
Salman Rushdie
#36. Two excellent crime fiction writers I'm currently reading...
Laura Wilson and Andrew Taylor
Roger Boutwell
#37. Horror writers shouldn't play nice. Disturb & unnerve your reader. Make them uncomfortable, but not so much they stop reading.
Pamela Morris
#38. Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.
Anne Tyler
#39. How you feel after reading something indicates not what you've read but where you are at.
A.D. Posey
#40. Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
Eudora Welty
#41. One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.
Samuel Johnson
#43. Writers aren't born, they're made
from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.
Alexander Chee
#45. I've discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and weird hotels.
Lee Child
#46. I loved the freedom writers diary and even though i only read it because my teacher made us i loved the book. it shows me some feelings that i also feel sometimes, and even though i never finished reading it because i got lazy its the only book ive ever liked
Erin Gruwell
#47. Our constant desire to genre-label cripples new writers. Let them experiment, explore and surprise.
Carla H. Krueger
#48. I've met writers who wanted to be writers from the age of six, but I certainly had no feelings like that. It was only in the Philippines when I was about 15 that I started reading books by very contemporary writers of the Beatnik generation.
Romesh Gunesekera
#49. Bravery isn't brandishing a sword. It's standing your moral ground and letting others try their best to take you down.
Carla H. Krueger
#50. I think a lot of young aspiring writers get misdirected; they think 'I ought to write this, even though I enjoy reading that'. What you have to do is write what you enjoy reading.
Jeffery Deaver
#51. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#52. People who don't read fiction are scared of what's inside their own heads.
Carla H. Krueger
#53. Writing barely differs from Talking and Reading. It appoints your hand while they engage your mouth and eyes respectively. The trio need the mind to combine sensible words from a meaningful arrangement of the 'simple' A B C to Z.
Olaotan Fawehinmi
#55. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
-Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, II
Denise Gigante
#56. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#59. Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique ... and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity - a bookish triumvirate.
Briar Kit Esme
#60. Eating and sleeping are the two periods in your life where writers get a pass for not reading. Check that.
Only sleeping.
Ted Bell
#61. The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire ... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.
Teju Cole
#62. All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.
Thomas Swick
#63. There was a day when writers actually read," he grumbles. "They could quote Keats and Socrates. Now anyone with a keyboard and a fifth-grade education can call themselves a writer.
J. Lincoln Fenn
#64. Never give up, Never surrender!!!!!
If you think you can't, then you must, if you must, then you can..Tony Robbins
Paula V. Hardin
#65. Before there were books, we read each other.
Lisa Cron
#66. Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people's imagination.
Henry James
#67. I really like older writers, perhaps because they take me out of my element. I don't have a great deal of interest in reading a fictionalized present as it's pretty insane as it is.
Henry Rollins
#68. I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.
Ann Brashares
#69. For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um ... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something ... then yeah, they're old enough. LOL
Michelle M. Pillow
#70. Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren't completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling
Jayden Hunter
#71. If you're going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.
Jamie L. Harding
#72. Only a true reader will understand how lovely it is to read a book on rainy days.
Nicholaa Spencer
#73. I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.
Anita Diament
#75. There are a lot of writers, but only one YOU.
Pandora Gray
#76. Cry while writing it, and readers will cry while reading it.
A.D. Posey
#77. The unlucky hand dealt to clear and precise writers is that people assume they are superficial and so do not go to any trouble inreading them: and the lucky hand dealt to unclear ones is that the reader does go to some trouble and then attributes the pleasure he experiences in his own zeal to them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#78. We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.
Roger Angell
#79. I have started a new blog W.A.R.(Writers Amongst Readers) for all those writing or reading books. Quotes, excerpts, comments from the world's greatest writers. See robinhawdonblog
Robin Hawdon
#80. Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work.
Kira Hawke
#81. The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story
Brandt Legg
#82. Something significant, magical, and
inspiring happens with each word you read in the pages of a book. You explore new lands, meet new people, feel new emotions, and are no longer the same person you were one word prior to reading it.
Martha Sweeney
#83. Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.
Susie Bright
#84. People are reading. In fact, due to social media they are reading more than any time in history. Now we must find a way to get them to include books in all that reading. It starts with us writers doing a better job of writing.
Will Gibson
#85. Writing in the dark is hard, but you have to light your own candle and do it anyway.
A.D. Posey
#86. I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.
Barbara Kingsolver
#88. I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much.
Jerry Spinelli
#89. Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.
Ruth Ozeki
#90. The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.
A.D. Posey
#91. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Just won my first writing award, thanks to you. To all who took the time to vote for me in 50 Great Writers You Should Be Reading, many thanks.
Linda Heavner Gerald
#92. Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.
Shannon Celebi
#93. I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.
M.V. Carey
#94. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
Margaret Atwood
#95. Give yourself to reading.' ... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works,
especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#96. Reading is like magic--I think I've made my case. Without the gift of words, this world's a crazy place!
Denise Walter McConduit
#97. Inspiration for what we produce comes from reading, observing the world of humans around us and also the animal kingdom
Walt Disney Company
#98. There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't.
Carla H. Krueger
#99. I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing.
Rupert Sanders
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