on reading - diane setterfield

There is something about words.  In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take
you prisoner.  Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when
you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood,
numb your thoughts.  Inside you they work their magic.

- Diane Setterfield

By Daniela Tieni

on reading - voltaire

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous
author is admirable.  For my part I read only to please myself and like
only what suits my taste.

- Voltaire, Candide

on reading - 3 wisdoms

The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a
passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.
- James Richardson

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the
postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here
before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were
composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters,
teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their
quests. And so are you.
- Elie Wiesel

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and
bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those,
dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag - and
never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because
it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which
bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when
you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its
right time for you.
- Doris Lessing

By Isabelle Arsenault

on reading - j.k. rowling

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

- J.K. Rowling

on reading - ray bradbury and the paris review

Love this interview The Paris Review did with Ray Bradbury.  Here
are some bits of what he said about writers and what they read:

Do you read your science-fiction contemporaries?

I’ve always believed that you should do very little reading in your
own field once you’re into it. But at the start it’s good to know what
everyone’s doing.

How about writers younger than you?

I prefer not to read the younger writers in the field. Quite often you
can be depressed by discovering they’ve happened onto an idea you
yourself are working on. What you want is simply to get on with
your own work.

You seem to have been open to a variety of influences.

A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a
high flame.

on reading - anne lamott

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and
widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers
make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their
truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy
is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping
along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over
and over again.

It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop
the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the
people who are together on that ship.

- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

on reading - anna quindlen

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

- Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

on reading - on writing - cassandra clare

We live and breathe words.

- Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

By Nidia

on reading - stephen king

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories.
Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who
won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be
like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book
that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

- Stephen King

By Alexandra Nicolaevna Pregel

on writing - kij johnson

But stories should not be cheap; they should cost the writer
something, and the reader something else.

- Kij Johnson 

on reading - carlos ruiz zafon

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that
few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that
finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words
we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives
and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no
matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover,
or how much we learn or forget—we will return.

- Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

on reading - robertson davies

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and
once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning
light, at noon and by moonlight.

― Robertson Davies

By Jonathan Wolstenholme

on reading - carl sagan

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts
(still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One
glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps
someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the
author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to
you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding
together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one
another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can
work magic.

- Carl Sagan

on reading - on writing - joseph conrad

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the
written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all,
to make you see.

- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

on writing - on reading - katherine paterson

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to
give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch
their imaginations--something that will help them make sense
of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward
people whose lives are quite different from their own.

- Katherine Paterson

By Lumao

on reading - madeleine l'engle

A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness,
leading out into the expanding universe.   - Madeleine L’Engle

on reading - marina tsvetaeva

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that
while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed,
has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on
living too, and like a river moved on and moved away.  No
one has stepped twice into the same river.  But did anyone
ever step twice into the same book? 

- Marina Tsvetaeva

By Tula Pink

on reading - helen exley

Books can be dangerous.  The best ones should be labeled,
"This could change your life."
 
- Helen Exley

By Jeff Donovan

on reading - on writing - jodi picoult

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no
more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when
they fall.

- Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls

on reading - on writing - barbara kingsolver

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished
I'd written.

- Barbara Kingsolver

By Dan McCaw