Quotes on how to become a better writer by reading

What writers and others say

“If the shoe fits, steal it.”

— One of Ann’s graduate writing students

“Go three days without reading and your speech will become tasteless.”

— Chinese proverb

“Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.”

— Charles Caleb Colton, clergyman, sportsman, gambler, and aphorist

“I not only use all the brains I have, I use all the brains I can borrow.”

— Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the United States

“Amateurs plagiarize. Real writers steal.”

— T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize-winning writer

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.”

— William Faulkner, Nobel Prize-winning novelist

“Read a lot. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post. When you find someone who’s work you like, ‘break the code,’ or figure out how they constructed it. Read a book a week: fiction, nonfiction — you can learn from both. I’m an inveterate reader of detective fiction. There’s no better narrative structure than good detective fiction.”

— David Halberstam, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, at the 2003 Nieman Narrative Conference

“Children need models more than they need critics.”

— Joseph Joubert, French essayist

“When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury —everything green and wondrous and seen through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M. Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hard-boiled. When I read Lovecraft, my prose became luxurious and Byzantine. I wrote stories in my teenage years where all these styles merged, creating a kind of hilarious stew. This sort of stylistic blending is a necessary part of developing one’s own style, but it doesn’t occur in a vacuum.”

— Stephen King, prolific novelist, in On Writing

“Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

— Stephen King, prolific novelist, in On Writing

“The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.”

— Stephen King, prolific novelist, in On Writing

“Beggars beg; geniuses steal.”

— Gerry McGovern, Web content management consultant

“Reading is the one necessary prerequisite for writing. Every published writer of books I know grew up reading.”

— Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“Writers learn from other writers. I collect examples of physical descriptions that I admire and study them for content, tone, pacing, even sentence length.”

— Chip Scanlan, senior faculty-writing, The Poynter Institute

“Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.”

— Giorgos Seferis, poet, writer, ambassador, Nobel laureate

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”

— Mark Twain, American writer and wit

“For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”

— Eudora Welty, author of stories from the American South

“The secret of good writing is simply reading.”

— Avi Wortis, award-winning children’s book author