When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading. Henry Youngman
I thought I’d begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine. Spike Milligan
Hannah: What do you read?
Victoria: Twitter. Derek s1e2, Channel 4 2013
Give me a thrill, says the reader,
Give me a kick;
I don’t care how you succeed, or
What subject you pick.
Choose something you know about
That’ll sound like real life:
Your childhood, your Dad pegging out,
How you sleep with your wife.
But that’s not sufficient, unless
You make me feel good –
Whatever you’re ‘trying to express’
Let it be understood
That ‘somehow’ God plaits up the threads,
Makes ‘all for the best’,
That we may lie quiet in our beds
And not be ‘depressed’.
For I call the tune in this racket:
I pay your screw,
Write reviews and the bull on the jacket –
So stop looking blue
And start serving up sensations
Before it’s too late;
Just please me for two generations –
You’ll be truly great. Philip Larkin, Fiction and the Reading Public
Reading and marriage don’t go well together. Moliere aka Jean-Baptiste Poquelin
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning. George F Kennan
A writer’s ambition should be ... to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years. Arthur Koestler, cited New York Times Review 1st April 1951
She was sitting there beside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future. Martin Amis, London Fields
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts
It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later. Finally, it is not too farfetched to imagine a future in which novels are not read at all. Gore Vidal, Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas, 1980
You hear all this whining going on, Where are our great writers? The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers? Gore Vidal, What I’ve Learned 2008
Reading isn’t an occupation we encourage among police officers. We try to keep the paper work down to a minimum. Joe Orton, Loot
Lola: What are you reading?
Mandy: The Guinness Book of Records. Mandy II: Mandy Bloody Blower, at the nailbar, BBC 2022