Top 100 What To Read Quotes
#1. As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical.
Harold Bloom
#2. Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
Isaac Rosenberg
#3. I really, honest to God, didn't know what to read until I was out of college and living in Boston, and someone said, 'Well, why don't you read Hemingway?' And I thought, 'OK. I guess I'll try this Hemingway fellow.'
Tom Drury
#4. With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
Doris Lessing
#5. Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#6. I was too shy to do anything but read, but there was nobody to tell me what to read.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#7. My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.
Neil Gaiman
#8. Oprah tells women what to read, what to eat, what to think, what to do ...
Adam Carolla
#9. I like to get suggestions on what to read. I'll look at Twitter, people I like, people I admire ... I'll go and research the book, download it on my phone and read it while I'm on the road.
Vance Joy
#10. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
Virginia Woolf
#11. I wish I knew when I was going to die,' ninety-six-year-old Dame Frances Anne often said, 'I wish I knew.'
'Why, Dame?'
'Then I should know what to read next.
Rumer Godden
#12. I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books.
Roald Dahl
#13. The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.
Jacques Ellul
#14. We have researchers involved with the show [Spartacus] and they pointed me in a pretty great direction, in terms of what to read, and what to look at or look for, and they also provided me with some material.
Dustin Clare
#16. Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.
Frank Zappa
#17. I was playing sports all the time, growing up. And then, somewhere around 10th or 11th grade, I kind of lost interest in that and just started reading a lot. I didn't know what to read. I didn't have much direction outside of school.
John Brandon
#19. It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
Kurt Vonnegut
#20. I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I'm in a state of utter confusion, don't know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I'm longing for something ...
Anne Frank
#21. Be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#22. So much of what I say gets sensationalized and journalists have to report on scandal because that's what people are hungry to read about.
Megan Fox
#23. The thing is, what I'm tryin' to say is -
they do get on a lot better without me, I can't help them any. They ain't mean. They buy me everything I want, but it's now - you've-got-it-go-play-with-it. You've got a roomful of things. I-got-you-that-book-so-go-read-it.
Harper Lee
#24. When I first read 'The River,' I had theories on what it was about, but once we got into rehearsal, I realized it's much simpler: It's about how human beings try to connect. The play holds a mirror up to the audience, and they take from it what's relevant to their lives.
Laura Donnelly
#25. What you're about to read is based on true events. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. And it will break your heart. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Melissa M. Futrell
#26. What to do when the market goes down? Read the opinions of the investment gurus who are quoted in the WSJ. And, as you read, laugh. We all know that the pundits can't predict short-term market movements. Yet there they are, desperately trying to sound intelligent when they really haven't got a clue.
Jonathan Clements
#27. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.
Thomas Pynchon
#28. After you read the script, then you actually just have to be in the moment you're in, in order to make it believable. You can't give it away. You can't tip it off. For me, it's always about being truthful in the moment I'm in. Hopefully, being able to reveal what I'm feeling, you have to believe it.
Victor Garber
#29. I read the 'Times' and 'Post,' but I have nothing against the 'Daily News.' I also fish around the Internet for entertainment news but find most of what I read to be untrue or partially true.
Andy Cohen
#30. What I like to do and what I have to do are two separate things. I like to read, swim, watch TV, spend time with my family. But I have to work, so I do that.
Jillian Medoff
#31. I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.
Samuel R. Delany
#32. If people would write exactly what I wanted to read I wouldn't feel so compelled to write myself.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#33. I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.
Julie Walters
#34. I read books that say if you want to keep sex hot you tell a person what you want. How do you tell 'em you want somebody else?
Elayne Boosler
#35. I think it's strange for people to read about themselves, no matter what's portrayed or how it's portrayed. But they get used to it, and I think they're fine with it.
Robert Kurson
#36. I not only couldn't read but often couldn't hear or understand what was being said to me - by the time I'd processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third.
Philip Schultz
#37. Expecting people to read your mind hardly ever gets you what you desire.
Sue Patton Thoele
#38. Write what you want to write; don't fear about who will read it.
Debasish Mridha
#39. It was at our library that I found Nancy Drew and fell in love with the genre. I've been grateful ever since for those tolerant, book-loving librarians who allowed a child like me to read what I wanted to read.
Nancy Pickard
#40. What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall.
Annie Dillard
#41. Are you available to travel? What kind of questions were these? Was the second one even allowed in a job interview? Still, she'd answered as best she could and finally read a question that made sense:
Melody Anne
#42. Easy to Understand, but profound wisdom for women seeking a deeper understanding of what happens to their bodies and minds as they reach the age of forty and beyond. A must read for every woman! -- Super Health Nation
Ivy Gilbert
#43. The spouses of authors ought to really read their better halves books. What is found amidst those pages may enlighten them to knowing a side of their partner that can only be seen on the written page.
Sai Marie Johnson
#44. Lacey said if he wanted to read a daily or regular critiques of the Bush administration, he would read the New York Times, and that's not what he wanted in the Village Voice.
Sydney Schanberg
#45. If the parents are too busy to read, it's a safe bet the children will feel the same way. Set aside time for family reading each night. It doesn't matter so much what the kids read, as long as you provide them space for reading and a sense that it is a valuable part of your daily routine.
Rick Riordan
#46. the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.
Sam Miller
#47. He can heal me. I believe He will. I believe I'm going to be an old surely Baptist preacher. And even if He doesn't ... that's the thing: I've read Philippians 1. I know what Paul says. I'm here let's work, if I go home? That's better. I understand that.
Matt Chandler
#48. Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.
Dan Savage
#49. There's still a lot of investors wondering what to invest in. And, of course, I think entertainment looks attractive when you read the few films that make these insane amounts of money. What they don't know is they don't always do that.
Ridley Scott
#50. And even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgement on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem to have learnt would not be science but history.
Rene Descartes
#51. 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
#52. What's the rush? Recognise that with the time at our disposal, there is only a limited number of good books you can read, a few really good movies worth seeing, and a finite number of hours, days, years to enjoy them!
Ken Puddicombe
#53. The caricature of what George Osborne is doing on the fiscal side is absurd. If you read some of the commentary, particularly from the left, you would think he was turning the clock back to the 1930s.
Nick Clegg
#54. I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage.
James Laughlin
#55. And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.
Eudora Welty
#56. What I had come to love about book club (besides the fabulous desserts and free liquor) was how in hearing so many opinions about the same book, your own opinion expanded, as if you'd read the book several times instead of just once.
Lorna Landvik
#57. What did people do prior to cell phones? Read a book? If I'm stuck in a car, and I don't have my phone, I'm like, 'What am I doing?' Car rides used to be one of my favorite things.
Chris Evans
#58. Do you want to change lives? Do you really want to change the world? Then read. Read as much as you can, as widely as you can and don't forget to read what you like. Most of all read what you love. There is power in that.
Abigail George
#59. Mankind is focused on earth; he is mostly interested in stupid things like wars or ideological absurdities. What he has to do is to concentrate on the universe, because the universe is a cosmic novel that he must read fully, that he must understand fully and that in the end he must rewrite it!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#60. People were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you gave yourself if you learned to read before you understood what all the words actually meant.
Terry Pratchett
#61. She could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.
Doris Lessing
#62. To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
Charles Caleb Colton
#63. I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.
Mark Waters
#64. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you.
Jeanette Winterson
#65. When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves
that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.
N. T. Wright
#66. Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Jonathan Sacks
#67. Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records - who's read what - and this has led to people being rounded up and killed.
Brewster Kahle
#68. Is it that important? Wouldn't it be more important to teach the least powerful? To help them make the most of what they do have? Should we teach only poets to read?
Rainbow Rowell
#69. The drive was brief and the conversation limited, but oh, what a legacy of love! Father never read to me from the Bible about the good Samaritan. Rather, he took me with him and Uncle Elias in that old 1928 Oldsmobile and provided a living lesson I have always remembered.
Thomas S. Monson
#70. They say we fear only what we don't understand. And, indeed, it's very hard to understand why doormen and ushers are so important, so arrogant, and so majestically impolite. When I read serious articles I feel exactly the same vague fear.
Anton Chekhov
#71. When you make comedy, you make it for the people and you try to have as many screenings and as many tests and you do focus groups and you read the cards and you try to give the people what they want in this comedy.
Chris Rock
#72. I want to read what you're thinking. I'm pretty sure it's not about housekeeping.
Kathryn Stockett
#73. I only read on my phone and the whole "let's see if we can get people to do it" idea seems less "wouldn't it be cool if we could get people to do it" and more "what else would people do."
Nathan Lowell
#74. People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Steve Jobs
#75. I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world.
Tom Stoppard
#76. By the time I had got to college, I had begun to read and had decided that most of what Christians believed could not be credible. So I became a philosophy major at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.
Stanley Hauerwas
#77. What I love about Popsicle and the moments I can be with Camden is that their whole philosophy is family and these moments that it can create to just sit with my son, read a comic book or go outside on a hot day, take a swim and have a Popsicle treat with him.
Vanessa Lachey
#78. Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.
Nick Hornby
#79. What sense did the world make? Where was God, the Bloody Fool? Did He have no notion of fair and unfair? Couldn't He read a simple balance sheet? He would have been sacked long ago if He were managing a corporation, the things he allowed to happen ...
Rohinton Mistry
#80. Now I read the updates on her online profile and she read mine, and that's what we were to each other.
David Levithan
#81. But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?
Pearl S. Buck
#82. You need someone to see what you've done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what's gone into it.
V.S. Naipaul
#83. Famed value investor Guy Spier has managed to write what is both a gripping memoir and a fascinating study of what it takes to succeed in investing and life. A must read!
John Mihaljevic
#84. The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to re-read it later.
Margaret Ayer Barnes
#85. She read the letter again and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be so desperate for a response that you would drop all sense of dignity and propriety and dash from the house at the first sight of the postman.
Charlie Lovett
#86. A lot of women read male magazines. Of course, a lot of guys read female magazines, but they've got another issue to deal with. But a lot of women read men's magazines and think, 'Oh, this is what these guys are thinking? Studying up on the enemy here.'
Sylvester Stallone
#87. We talked about how impossible it is to read minds and hearts and what a relief it is to hear what the person you love needs and learn how to give it.
Glennon Doyle Melton
#88. When you read something, it's a movie in your mind and such a personal experience. What we're trying to do is to bring a consensus version of that to life and make as many people happy as we can.
Katherine McNamara
#89. The Endgame book was an American soup, if everything can be predicted what's the purpose to read it?
Deyth Banger
#90. I wish I could read my books over for the first time to see what you guys see.
Shandy L. Kurth
#91. Erudite and entertaining, Max Anderson is the perfect tour guide to the world of art. The Quality Instinct is both educational and enlightening from start to finish, the thinking person's guide to museums. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand what makes a masterpiece.
Daniel Silva
#92. FYI, when I type WTF, you are supposed to read What the Fuck? Same with OMG, and OMFG, which are Oh My God and Oh My Fucking God. Only a completely lame Disney Channel nimnode pronounces the letters.
Christopher Moore
#93. The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you've put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don't do that now.
Helen Fielding
#94. A message To the children who have read this book. When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important. A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants -and DESERVES- is a parent who is SPARKY! - Danny, the champion of the world.
Roald Dahl
#95. What is sublime? / the artist said. / I haven't time / to be well read. / To be sub lime / I'll place, instead, / green citrus fruit / upon my head.
Walter Darby Bannard
#96. It helps to know from a very early age what you want to do. From the time I was five years old, I wanted to be a writer, even though I couldn't even read. It was mainly because I thought of my father as a writer.
Tom Wolfe
#97. I always tend to write about outsiders. And what's been fun for me is, as I travel around and visit schools, is that other kids that feel the same way relate to some of my characters, and so I hope in some way that's helping them when they want to read about somebody that they can relate to.
Kimberly Willis Holt
#98. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsmen who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.
Henry David Thoreau
#99. Be a good reading role model. Show kids what you like to read, what you don't like to read, how you choose what you read. Let them see you reading.
Jon Scieszka
#100. When I read a book, I want you to be reading it at the same time. I want to know what would Amelia think of it. I want you to be mine. I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart, Amy.
Gabrielle Zevin
