12 quotes about reading
by Laura Hale Brockway
Good writers are voracious readers. Like musicians who listen to music to analyze it, writers read to analyze. We also read to find inspiration. Whether we read classics, modern fiction, comic books, recipe books, tweets or New Yorker articles, we can always take away something to incorporate into our writing.
One of the secrets to good writing is simply reading.
Below are some inspirational quotes about books and reading, including a few by other writers.
1. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
— George R.R. Martin
2. “Show me the books you read, and I’ll show you who you are.”
— Unknown
3. “If you cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all.”
— Oscar Wilde
4. “For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”
— Eudora Welty
5. “These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.”
— Gilbert Highet
6. “We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts; we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”
— Philip Pullman
7. “The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”
— Ross McDonald
8. “Never judge a book by its movie.”
— Unknown
9. “A man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
— Mark Twain
10. “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
— Stephen King
11. “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles William Eliot
12. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin
Readers, any other relevant quotes you’d like to share?
This article was also published on Ragan Communication’s PR Daily.
