“Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.”

“The practice of reading aloud did do something towards attuning my ear. The subtle cadences of Elizabethan blank verse taught me more than the substantial study of English prosody could do at that time.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

“Read. Always read. No one can take that away from you.”

Percival Everett book I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“Read Homer once, and you can read no more;
For all books else appear so mean, so poor,
Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read,
And Homer will be all the books you need.”

John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1648–1721) English poet and notable Tory politician of the late Stuart period

“I just read and read and read. … I have always enjoyed reading.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

“Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

“There is one way, and only one, of correctly reading a Latin hexameter. There may be three or four ways of reading an English blank verse line. I venture to say that no two mortals ever read aloud any given long passage of verse with precisely the same rhythms.”

John Livingston Lowes (1867–1945) American academic

“Take some books and read; that’s an immense help; and books are always good company if you have the right sort.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

“It's not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that's not read friendship.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

“We read with our ears”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet