Top 82 Reading As Art Quotes
#1. Reading and analyzing what you are reading, why you like this or don't like that, can only make you a better writer. So reading is a must! Just like art students study the masters, we too should study and learn from those we adore and/or aspire to be like.
Darynda Jones
#2. But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
Russell Banks
#3. The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
Lynda Barry
#4. The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection.
Mortimer J. Adler
#5. I recommend the art of slow reading.
Amos Oz
#6. Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art ... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.
Betsy Hearne
#7. I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,
If one be better with them or without,
Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,
Knows the high art of what and how to read.
John Godfrey Saxe
#8. I never really took a proper art class in college. I just started reading art magazines and going to galleries. I was really drawn to it.
Larry Gagosian
#9. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.
Raymond Chandler
#10. Reading about the response of people in stories, plays, poems, helps us to respond more courageously and openly at our own moments of turning.
Madeleine L'Engle
#11. Tape reading is a lost art that today is not very useful.
Steven A. Cohen
#12. I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.
Alice Munro
#13. Without a doubt,
I must read,
all the books
I've read about.
See the artworks
hung on hooks,
that I have only,
seen in books.
Lang Leav
#14. If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
Thomas Carlyle
#16. The art of reading, as of learning, is this: ... to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential.
Adolf Hitler
#17. In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.
Ben Lerner
#18. We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.
Lionel Trilling
#19. A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
Henry David Thoreau
#20. 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
#21. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
Flannery O'Connor
#22. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, I read, therefore it writes.
Italo Calvino
#23. To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.
Adolf Hitler
#24. Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
Arnold Bennett
#25. For the grand and inescapable tradition of western literary classics confronts us with fundamental choices over our understanding of words, reading and art, as well as citizenship, civilization, faith, and the whole notion of the true, the good, and the faithful.
Os Guinness
#26. Mastering the art of asking questions is essential to creativity and innovation. A More Beautiful Question should be standard reading for all aspiring design thinkers as well an inspiration to those searching for a life of curiosity and meaning.
Tim Brown
#27. When I first got interested in comics at the time I was studying architecture and I discovered comics as a medium through listening to Art who was courting me by reading me Little Nemo and Krazy Kat by George Herriman. It was really very effective.
Francoise Mouly
#28. My wife is a painter, musician, and fiber artist. We married in 1993, and as she worked, I found that my reading about art was helping me understand what she was doing, just as seeing her work gave me a language with which to speak of art.
Floyd Skloot
#29. I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.
Clive Bell
#30. Reading and writing ... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect ... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.
Clive James
#31. There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.
Isaac D'Israeli
#32. There are three classes of readers; some enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy, and enjoy while they judge. The latter class reproduces the work of art on which it is engaged. Its numbers are very small.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#33. Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.
Robert Pinsky
#34. It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece.
John Erskine
#35. Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
Boris Pasternak
#36. He found he was now incapable of understanding a single word of the volumes he consulted; his very eyes stopped reading, and it seemed as if his mind, gorged with literature and art, refused to absorb any more.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#37. Three hundred years from now children will be learning about a lost art that has the ability to:
Enrich minds,
Increase intelligence,
Reduce stress
Increase knowledge
Increase concentration
IT'S CALLED READING
Steven Aitchison
#38. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
Julian Barnes
#39. Reading is the strangest art. Your eye takes a shape, turns it into music, then story, then spirit, so a curl of ink laid long ago by a sliver of reed can become, a thousand years later, your own breath.
Keith Miller
#40. I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.
Ian Caldwell
#41. Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
Alberto Manguel
#42. The art of reading between the lines is as old as manipulated information.
Serge Schmemann
#43. Other people's creativity inspires me. Seeing great art, or reading a fab book or watching an interesting documentary or an exciting film - these things make me want to let my own imagination fly.
Kate Cary
#44. Tarot Reading is an art based on intuition, interpretation, and perception.
Nikita Dudani
#45. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
#46. My family always encouraged my drawing ability. Kids in school who teased me about my reading would get out of their seats and stand behind my desk as I worked and go, 'Wow, you can really draw.' Later, I earned a degree in Fine Art and got a Ph.D. in Art History.
Patricia Polacco
#47. Read the classics one hour every day, drunk or sober. Reading the classics gives one a feeling of confidence. It familiarizes one with the vagaries of life. It shows one that there are really no new plots.
Richard Haynes
#48. One of the things about the arts that is so important is that in the arts you discover the only way to learn how to do it is by doing it. You can't write by reading a book about it. The only way to learn how to write a book is to sit down and try to write a book
David McCullough
#49. I'm enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art - I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to.
Nell Zink
#50. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#51. I have lots of passions - gardens, art, music and reading. I have eclectic taste and read a huge variety of books.
Zoe Wanamaker
#52. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
#53. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.
Annie Dillard
#54. There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.
Charles Bukowski
#55. Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.
Michel De Certeau
#56. Every book begins and ends with other people- the readers who suggest the book to us and encourage us to read it, the talented author who crafted each word, the fascinating individuals we meet inside the pages- and the readers we discuss and share the book with when we finish.
Donalyn Miller
#57. It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.
Vincent Van Gogh
#58. The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books.
Maurice Francis Egan
#59. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
Evan Hunter
#60. Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.
Maxim Gorky
#61. Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
Francois Truffaut
#62. There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts ... it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.
David Coleman
#63. Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.
Harley King
#64. The skill, the art of literacy is a gift. To read is to watch in your mind as a single word explodes into a confetti of images. Truly, of all the gifts given to man, reading is most sacred, For from words come dreams and from dreams come great tomorrows.
Stephen Cosgrove
#65. There's no pressure in baseball. Pressure is when the doctor is getting ready to cut you, take your heart out, and put it on a table.
Charlie Manuel
#67. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)
C.S. Lewis
#68. The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves ... The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.
Harold Bloom
#69. The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.
Holbrook Jackson
#70. We recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.
Maria Montessori
#71. The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.
Robertson Davies
#72. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
Jenim Dibie
#73. Looking beyond the silhouette and reading between the lines are the same thing; just different art forms.
Nanette L. Avery
#74. The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading.
Michael Silverblatt
#75. Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on ... Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than befor
James W. Sire
#76. Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
John Waters
#77. He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.
Arthur Balfour
#78. The art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.
Joyce Carol Oates
#79. Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.
Patti Smith
#80. People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
George Bernard Shaw
#81. Writing is a channeling of an individual experience; so is reading. That's what's so exciting about this art form - it's interactive.
T.C. Boyle
#82. The 'Fortune' I came to work for on Jan. 25, 1954, was a monthly, with pages significantly larger than what you're reading; 'art' covers that did not relate to stories inside; and a newsstand price of $1.25.
Carol Loomis
