Top 88 Writers On Reading Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.
Jennifer Echols
#6. I was reading all these male writers who were doing wild and wonderful things. It gave me permission to experiment.
Sandra Cisneros
#7. 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
#8. A writer's uniqueness glows and transforms the heart and the soul of a reader.
A.D. Posey
#9. Read different to think differently; world is already into rat race.
Aman Jassal
#10. 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
#11. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. You know, you hear about these writers reading 'Lolita' at 12. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher.
Susan Barker
#20. How you feel after reading something indicates not what you've read but where you are at.
A.D. Posey
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. There's a difference between publicity and marketing. A lot of writers don't realize how much marketing goes on beyond the scenes, with sales reps and advanced reading copies, all that stuff that happens months before a book is published.
Victoria Strauss
#24. I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
Gore Vidal
#25. When entering a library, I never forget to bow down!
Avijeet Das
#26. As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.
Stephen Gaghan
#27. When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.
Tahir Shah
#28. Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or evil than any other form of literature on earth.
Dr. Seuss
#29. I picked up reading late because I grew up dyslexic. When I went to college, a friend who was a big reader got me started on a number of writers, including Hemingway.
Lee Pace
#30. A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.
Kathryn Harrison
#31. If words come alive on the page, the writer succeeds in connecting to the reader.
Aman Jassal
#32. You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.
Don Roff
#33. Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.
Steven Pinker
#34. 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
#35. Reading is sexy. Women who read are suspect. Women who write dangerous.
Chloe Thurlow
#36. All the books I was reading as a teenager were about individuals having adventures. So I thought that was what writers were supposed to do: to go out on the road.
Patrick DeWitt
#37. Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.
Ernest Hemingway,
#38. The average buyer in bookshop spends 8 seconds on the front cover and 15 seconds on the back cover before deciding whether to purchase the book or not. On average, he does not get past page 18. See? The odds are stacked against us writers!
Ashwin Sanghi
#39. Oh you cut your hair! What happened? Are you going through a breakup or something?"
"My favorite character died.
Joyce Rachelle
#40. The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.
R.M. Engelhardt
#41. That's just it, Eva said with a gleam in her eyes that matched the rhinestones on her glasses, you had to get somebody to teach you, to facilitate. Literacy wasn't like a piece of my mama's lemon cake you handed over to somebody on a plate.
Minrose Gwin
#42. The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.
Robert Galbraith
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#47. 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
#48. 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
#51. 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
#52. Eating and sleeping are the two periods in your life where writers get a pass for not reading. Check that.
Only sleeping.
Ted Bell
#53. 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
#54. All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.
Thomas Swick
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Before there were books, we read each other.
Lisa Cron
#58. Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people's imagination.
Henry James
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren't completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling
Jayden Hunter
#63. 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
#64. Only a true reader will understand how lovely it is to read a book on rainy days.
Nicholaa Spencer
#65. 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
#67. 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
#68. Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work.
Kira Hawke
#69. The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story
Brandt Legg
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Writing in the dark is hard, but you have to light your own candle and do it anyway.
A.D. Posey
#74. I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.
Barbara Kingsolver
#76. Cry while writing it, and readers will cry while reading it.
A.D. Posey
#77. The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.
A.D. Posey
#78. There are a lot of writers, but only one YOU.
Pandora Gray
#79. Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.
Shannon Celebi
#80. 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
#81. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
Margaret Atwood
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Inspiration for what we produce comes from reading, observing the world of humans around us and also the animal kingdom
Walt Disney Company
#85. There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't.
Carla H. Krueger
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. People who don't read fiction are scared of what's inside their own heads.
Carla H. Krueger
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