Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Empson

Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry

William Empson

I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose; it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes reading poetry seem more natural.

William Ernest Henley

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

William Styron

You live several lives while reading [a good book].

Wilkie Collins

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

Walter Savage Landor

What is reading but silent conversation?

Walter Scott

If a faultless poem could be produced, I am satisfied it would tire the critics themselves; and annoy the whole reading world with the spleen.

Walter Dean Myers

We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

Walter Dean Myers

There is a crisis involving reading in certain communities.

Walter Dean Myers

We all know we should eat right and we should exercise, but reading is treated as if it's this wonderful adjunct.

Walter Dean Myers

We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.

Walter Dean Myers

Reading is not optional.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.

Winston Churchill

I have consistently urged my friends to abstain from reading it.

Willie McCovey

Even during my career, when I read all those great things about me, it's almost like I was reading about someone else. It's almost like there was another person.

William Zinsser

Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.

William Zinsser

I try to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that's not doing useful work. Then I go over it once more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at how much clutter can still be cut.

William Zinsser

Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.

William Zinsser

Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.

William Zinsser

Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.

William Zinsser

Also bear in mind, when you're choosing your words and stringing them together, how they sound. This may seem absurd: readers read with their eyes. But in fact they hear what they are reading far more than you realize.

William Zinsser

Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.

William Safire

By elevating your reading, you will improve your writing or at least tickle your thinking.

William Safire

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

William Mapother

I can be a bit of a science geek. I tend more towards reading about brain science, neuroscience.

William Matthews

Solitary reading will enable a man to stuff himself with information, but without conversation his mind will become like a pond without an outlet-a mass of unhealthy stag-nature. It is not enough to harvest knowledge by study; the wind of talk must winnow it and blow away the chaff. Then will the clear, bright grains of wisdom be garnered, for our own use or that of others.

William J. Brennan

Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work.

Virginia Woolf

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

William Shatner

I enjoyed reading all the classic authors like Isaac Asimov and Bradbury.

William Nicholson

We read to know that we are not alone.

William McFee

There is a pleasure unknown to the landsman in reading at sea.

William Gaddis

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

Will Eisner

Still,[...] in all forms of comics the sequential artist relies upon the tacit cooperation of the reader. This cooperation is based upon the convention of reading and the common cognitive disciplines. Indeed, it is this very voluntary cooperation, so unique to comics, that underlies the contract between artist and audience.