The same common sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.
There is as much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it.
To make a book is as much a trade as to make a clock; something more than intelligence is required to become an author.
Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking in the fields, that he was, as he was wont, reading in his book, and greatly distressed in his mind; and, as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, crying, What shall I do to be saved?
Never read bad stuff if you’re an artist; it will impair your own game. I don’t know if you ever played competitive tennis, but you learn not to watch bad tennis; it messes up your game. Art’s the same way.
You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn’t put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.
What a glut of books! Who can read them?
The home is the child’s first school, the parent is the child’s first teacher, and reading is the child’s first subject.
Children who are read to learn two things: First, that reading is worthwhile, and second, that they are worthwhile.
Reading will give you lasting pleasure.
There is nothing political about American literature.
Research shows us that children who are read to from a very early age are more likely to begin reading themselves at an early age. They’re more likely to excell in school. They’re more likely to graduate secondary school and go to college.
When you read with your child, you show them that reading is important, but you also show them they’re important – that they are so important to you that you will spend 20 minutes a day with your arm around them.
When I was 8, I was reading a book in which it was snowing. When I looked outside, I expected there to be snow on the ground. I thought, “This is the most powerful thing I can do! I’m going to be a writer.”
We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.
Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.
I snatched the paper away from Dopey. “Hey,” he yelled. “I was reading that!” “Let somebody who can pronounce all the big words have a try,” I said.