Famous Authors – 15 Most Powerful Thoughts On Reading

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

3. Margaret Atwood
on learning how to read.

“Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.”

4. Harper Lee
on necessity of reading.
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

5. William Faulkner
on what we should read and why!

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.” 

6. Neil Gaiman
on teaching our children to read.

“The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity.”

7. Virginia Woolf
and all bookworms go to heaven!

“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.” 

8. Maya Angelou
on letting books build you from inside out.

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”

9. Ian McEwan
on book immersion.

“Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.”

10. C.S.Lewis
on growing old with books.

“Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.”

11. E.M. Forster
on reading books instead of using them as ornaments!

“Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.”

12. George Orwell
on being honest when it comes to (not)reading.

“And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.”

13. Kurt Vonnegut
on reading as a form of meditation.

“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”

14. PG Wodehouse
on books and friendships.

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”

15. Marcel Proust
on living fuller lives as readers!

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favourite book.”