Top 100 Worth Reading Quotes
#1. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99
Roger Lowenstein
#3. Anything John Stott says is worth listening to. Anything he writes is worth reading. Basic Christianity is not only a classic must-read for every believer; it is truly a blessing preserved on the written page for the enrichment of this generation and those to come.
Anne Graham Lotz
#4. Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading.
Ray Bradbury
#5. Read something worth writing about or write something worth reading about
Anonymous
#6. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
Sharon Creech
#7. If a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.
Paulo Coelho
#8. Let the enemy fall by their swords. Words not worth reading die their own death. But our Words will be Told!
K.A. Gunn
#9. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin
#10. All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.
Thomas Swick
#11. Who knows who you are ... A person is a novel: you don't know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth reading to the very end ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#12. I'm being forced to challenge ideas that have kept me safe for so long. There's an entire library of information in my head, and suddenly I can't decide if any of it is worth reading.
Louise Gornall
#13. The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.
Harold Holzer
#14. I'm alive. This might be the first time I've ever really been alive in my whole fucking miserable life. This moment is what causes wars to start. The only books worth reading have been written about those lips.
Gregory Sherl
#15. Writing is a solitary pursuit and I think you have to be partially at peace with yourself, but it's the other part that's usually producing the stuff worth reading.
Craig Johnson
#16. In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
Maria Semple
#17. 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
#18. Don't leave your life a blank page. Make each word count and leave behind something worth reading.
Mae East
#19. Only one book is worth reading: the heart.
Ajahn Chah
#20. I have finally figured out the meaning of life: there's no such thing. And that's a beautiful thing, because that means that WE get to choose it ourselves. Life has no meaning besides the meaning you give it. You are indeed the author of your destiny. So why not write a book worth reading?
Dean Bokhari
#21. The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
Archibald MacLeish
#22. If a book is worth reading at all, it is worth reading more than once. Suspense is the lowest of excitants, designed to take your breath away when the brain and heart crave to linger in nobler enjoyment. Suspense drags you on; appreciation causes you to linger.
William Gerhardie
#23. Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.
Mark Doty
#24. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life.
David Mitchell
#25. Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
Isaac Asimov
#26. Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.
Moliere
#27. Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.
Edward Abbey
#28. In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.
George Bernard Shaw
#29. Any heroine worth reading about will one day find herself on the moors of a devastating personal crisis. For the most part, we must traverse them alone.
Chapter 10 Steadfastness Jane Eyre
Erin Blakemore
#30. If a book is worth reading, it will most probably be worth reading twice.
Aman Jassal
#31. 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
#32. Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not worth reading.
Mortimer J. Adler
#33. A wise man once said that if a book was not worth reading twice it was not worth reading once.
Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson
#34. If a book isn't worth reading over and over again, it isn't worth reading at all.
Oscar Wilde
#35. I think sports makes for good drama because it has all the same ingredients as anything worth reading or listening to or watching. Conflict, desire, heartbreak - it's all there.
Jay Baruchel
#36. Jeremiah is a most melancholy prophet. He wails from beginning to end; he is often childish, is rarely indecent, and although it may be blasphemy to say so, he and his 'Lamentations' are really not worth reading.
Annie Besant
#37. I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay
Ursula K. Le Guin
#38. I never know what I am writing. The moment you know what you're writing, you're writing nothing worth reading.
Richard Flanagan
#39. No book worth reading ever fails to be steeped with the spirit of the person who wrote it.
Paul Leicester Ford
#40. A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.
Leszek Kolakowski
#41. If you want your name to be remembered after your death either do something worth writing or write some thing worth reading
Abraham Lincoln
#42. Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.
Susan Sontag
#43. The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
Leslie Jamison
#44. A book isn't worth reading if it's not worth discussing.
Rick Holland
#45. Papa thought that any book worth reading twice was worth owning. So instead of buying desserts, we bought books.
Natalie S. Bober
#46. Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
William Ernest Henley
#47. If you really want people to pay attention to how you feel, you need to express your feelings in language that's worth reading.
David Starkey
#48. It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.
Lynn Coady
#49. History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#51. It is a tragedy and therefore not worth reading ...
Jane Austen
#52. I do not know whether you are fond of chemical reading. There are some things in this science worth reading.
Thomas Jefferson
#54. Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
George Macaulay Trevelyan
#55. Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.
Stephen King
#56. Is impossible to specify what [consciousness] is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.
Stuart Sutherland
#57. The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.
Douglas Coupland
#58. If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
Carson McCullers
#59. From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.
Thomas Jefferson
#60. A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#61. The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
Leslie Fiedler
#62. I don't read anything anymore. I don't have the eyesight. I read my own copy, that's all. I think I've read everything that's worth reading.
John Gould
#63. Rosa Luxemburg was - still is for me - a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.
Christopher Hitchens
#64. A human being is like a novel: until the last page you don't know how it will end. Or it wouldn't be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#65. I will spend my life traveling, laughing, drinking all kinds of tea, meeting new people, reading good books, growing things, creating beauty, eating chocolate, doing magic, making love and occasionally I will write something worth reading.
Brooke Hampton
#66. The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.
Robert Anton Wilson
#67. Whether my columns are worth reading isn't for me to say.
John Podhoretz
#69. Write something worth reading and your voice will be heard.
Teresa Mummert
#71. The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.
H.L. Mencken
#72. None of [the books are] worth reading. There are no fairy tales, no faerie tails, no sword-swinging princesses or lightning-throwing gods.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#73. What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.
Rikki Ducornet
#74. Growing up my dad would say, 'if your life were a book, would it be one worth reading?
B.L. Berry
#75. The heart is the only book worth reading.
Ajahn Chah
#76. If you would not be forgotten
When you are old and rotten
Either write something worth reading
Or do something worth writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
Edna Bell-Pearson
#77. When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.
Billy Collins
#78. He looked at his foreword, written, as ever, in his customary green ink, with the simple, if guilty, hope that in the abyss that lay between his dream and his failure there might be something worth reading in which the truth could be felt.
Richard Flanagan
#79. A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.
Kathryn Harrison
#80. No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#81. Edward Conard provides a provocative interpretation of the causes of the global financial crisis and the policies needed to return to rapid growth. Whether you agree or not, this analysis is well worth reading.
Nouriel Roubini
#82. Write about fear. Write about pain. Write about heartache and resentment. Nothing worth reading comes from writing what can be said out loud.
Alexandra Cruz
#83. Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous, and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading.
Amos Bronson Alcott
#84. It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.
C.S. Lewis
#85. I was always taught that book keeping was more relevant than book reading. The only thing worth reading was meant to be a balance sheet.
Ashwin Sanghi
#86. Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading.
Steve Lopez
#87. Books are people,' smiled Miss Marks. 'In every book worth reading, the author is there to meet you, to establish contact with you. He takes you into his confidence and reveals his thoughts to you.
D.E. Stevenson
#88. I'm the only one who can accurately tell my story. It's up to me to make it worth reading.
Keisha Elle
#89. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally don't know how to read them.
Martin Buber
#90. If the warmth of her Language could affect the body it might
be worth reading in this weather.
Jane Austen
#92. If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
John Ruskin
#93. Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Antonin Artaud
#94. A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#95. Ultimately, the first, best step in getting your work noticed is to write good work. If people don't engage in your writing, no amount of serialization or free downloads is going to matter. You have to write something worth reading, and often it takes time to get at that level.
John Scalzi
#96. We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principal yardstick for our definition of our children's worth.
Kenneth Keniston
#97. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#99. To live in books is cowardly
but people are not worth investigation.
Lily Koppel
#100. What I look for is identifying what the utility of a character is to the telling of the story overall. If I can identify that from reading the script, then I've got a clear idea of whether or not I think the character is worth playing.
Harrison Ford
