On Reading Quotes

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.

[from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]”
― Lois Lowry

“A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath

“Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go 15 rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. “The Magic Flute” v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. “The Last Supper” v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception -– “Blonde on Blonde” might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chance against Citizen Kane. And every now and again you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature 29 times out of 30.”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

“Reading is never a waste of time.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.”
― Marcel Proust

“A man who possesses the art of correct reading will … instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing … The art of reading, as of learning, is this: … to retain the essential, to forget the nonessential.”
― HITLER, Mein Kampf

“Literature is literature. Its purpose is to challenge and disorient us, to break us down a little bit so that we are forced to rebuild ourselves. Over time, over the course of many books, we construct a deeper, truer self.”
― Mark Slouka

“Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind tham lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.”
― Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

“To imagine wasn’t to escape but to go deeper; to see through to the secret life of the world.”
― Alison MacLeod, Unexploded

“[Kafka on Strindberg] I don’t read him to read him, but rather to lie on his breast. He holds me on his left arm like a child. I sit there like a man on a statue. Ten times I almost slip off, but at the eleventh attempt I sit there firmly, feel secure, and have a wide view.”
― Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1914-1923