William Safire Quotes

Reading helps you to be knowledgeable. It also improvises your vocabulary. It's a very good habit, extremely essential.

Reading is more important than writing.

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.

Reading taught me how to write.

Everything I worry about would be better if more people could read, write and comprehend.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Read in order to live.

Read everything! I believe that reading made me a writer.

Reading is No. 1 - I have to read, or I can't write.

I don't know what else teaches you as much as writing. Perhaps reading. So if I don't have one or the other in the course of the day, I feel old.

All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

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.

If you can't read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it's a way to get information and find out what's going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination.

Reading and writing is so important, and it's something I am really keen to promote. It's something that can be a bit lost these days with so much else going on.

I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.

A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.