Well,Jim, I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.

-Joyce, Nora   d.1951
To her husband James Joyce. Recalled on her death,12  Apr1951.

I read the first 2 pages of the usual sloppy English and [Stuart Gilbert] read me a lyrical bit about nudism in the wood and the end which is a piece of propaganda in favour of something which, outside of D. H. L.'s country at any rates, makes all the propaganda for itself.

-Joyce,James Augustine Aloysius
On D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Letter to Harriet Weaver,17 Dec.

Ich glaube, mann sollte u«  berhaupt nur solche Bu«  cher lesen, die einen beiÞen und stechen. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

-Kafka, Franz
  Letter to Oskar Pollack. Collected in Richard and Clara Winston (eds and trans) Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (1977).

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.One does not love breathing.

-Lee, (Nelle) Harper
  Scout. To Kill  A Mockingbird, pt.1, ch.2.

The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading; We are what we read.

-Manguel, Alberto
  A History of Reading.

Quis leget haec? Who'll read that sort of thing?

-Persius properly Aulus Persius Flaccus
Satirae, no.1,1.2 (translated byW S Merwin,1961).

The trouble with me is, I always have to read that stuff by myself. If an actor reads it out, I hardly listen. I keep worrying about whether he's going to do something phoney every minute.

-Salinger,J(erome) D(avid)
  Of Hamlet.The Catcher in the Rye, ch.16.

  He read partly for information, partly for comparison, partly for insight, partly for the sheer joy of felicitous statement.He delighted particularly inquotationswhich distilled the essence of an argument.

-Schlesinger, Arthur M(eier),Jr
  Of John F Kennedy. AThousand Days.

   Loving in truth, and vain in verse my love to show, That she (dear she) mighttake some pleasure of my pain, Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know; Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain.

-Shute, Nevil originally Nevil Shute Norway
Astrophel and Stella, sonnet1.

I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but theyare in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup Looking down for miles Through high still air.

-Snyder, Gary Sherman
  Riprap,'Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout'.

You should only read what istruly good or what isfrankly bad.

-Stein, Gertrude
Quoted in Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast (1964), ch.3.

A classic†something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

-Twain, Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens
  Speech on'The Disappearance of Literature'at the Nineteenth Century Club, 20 Nov. Quoted in Albert Bigelow Paine (ed) MarkTwain's Speeches (1910).

Lady Peabury was in the morning room reading a novel; 892 early training gave a guilty spice to this recreation, for she had been brought up to believe that to read a novel before luncheon was one of the gravest sins it was possible for a gentlewoman to commit.

-Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn
  'An Englishman's Home'.

But here I am in Kent and Christendom, Among the Muses, where I read and rhyme.

-Wyatt, SirThomas (the Elder)
  'Mine Own John Poins'.

When you are old and greyand full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly how Love fled And paced among the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

-Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)
  'WhenYou Are Old', complete poem. Collected in The Rose (1893).