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Read widely, not only in your own field, but in others. There's much for fiction writers to learn from nonfiction, and for nonfiction writers to learn from fiction. Moreover, don't neglect to look for the poetry in fiction and nonfiction.
Read critically, but with an open mind. The best-seller you hate must contain some impetus that speaks to millions. What is there in it from which you can learn?
All reading is learning. From academic to professional--from literary to newspapers, from sublime to ridiculous--from one word to the next--if you would write--READ.
"Books still offer the most complete kind of understanding, and
they last."
- Rob Woodward
"Books are the main source of our knowledge, our reservoir of
faith, memory, wisdom, morality, poetry, philosophy, history, and science."
- Daniel J. Boorstin
"I have always come to life after coming to books."
- Jorge Luis Borges
"A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within
us."
- Franz Kafka
"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed
and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
- John Milton
"Books think for me."
- Charles Lamb
"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly
exhausted at the end."
- William Styron
"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify
himself, to multiply in ways which he exists, to make his life full, significant,
and interesting."
- Aldous Huxley
"A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed
keeping rabbits."
- Edith Sitwell
"Perhaps the reason why the U.S.A. lags behind other nations in
book-reading is that there are so many people trying to write and have
no time left over for reading."
- Editors of J. B. Lippencott Co.
"Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely
have commentators."
- Albert Camus
"I think the writer ought to help the reader as much as he can
without damaging what he wants to say; and I don't think it ever hurts
the writer to sort of stand back now and then and look at his stuff as
if he were reading it instead of writing it."
- James Jones
"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 one book."
- Samuel Johnson
"No writer who rarely reads can write well; the writing mind must
be stimulated with words from outside the self."
- Gloria T. Delamar
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