Saul Williams Quotes

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

We read often with as much talent as we write.

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind.

If you want to be a writer, don't worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.

I love to read, and I love to write. I love to read. You have no idea how many books I have.

I'm not a writer. I like being a reader.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed reading as a child.

All writers I know are readers first and foremost, and that's why you become a writer.

Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.

I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

Authors like reading. Go figure. So it's not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.