Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it ... To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it — everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not interactive with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it.

It is only by struggling with difficult books, books over one's head, that anyone learns to read.

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.

The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one'sintellect thrown back on its own resourses. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

The truth is you have to get on top of the reading as soon as possible and you have to keep in mind that this is the sum of people’s YEARS of hard labour, sweat and pain that you hold in your hands. Without being able to meet all the people who make that thing in your hand possible, you have to conjure up their presence, interact with every single book with great reverence.

To be remarkable, read books.

..reading a book doesn’t mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.

Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is nor a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay — the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds well-train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, not on a few coteries of writers.

Don't read a book and be a follower; read a book and be a student.

There is not perhaps any man so good a judge of the difficulty of writing a book, as an actual author. He soon discovers how many qualifications are necessary, how much science is required, and which are the points of most difficult access. He soon finds out his own deficiencies; and, as regards his powers, that some difficulties may be insurmountable. That essay, which sometimes originates in study and amusement, gets insensibly into growth, and is perpetuated. For, having been undertaken in the spirit of an inquirer, it is frequently carried on in the capacity of a student. This student, however, soon assumes the master, and pronounces his decisions on critical subjects, as authoritatively as if all learning and languages were at his fingers ends. ...No man’s industry is mis-spent, if he merely clear the obstruction from any path ; and the very attempt to shew what's right, frequently exposes that which is wrong; so that the immediate blunders of one person rectify those of another; and he ever must deserve well of society who attempts improvement. ...Bibliography is a dry occupation,—a caput mortuum,—it is a borrowed production, which brings very little grist to the mill; and so difficult and tedious is the object, of laying before our eyes all the real or reported copies or editions of the works enumerated, that almost every line of our reports may be suspected of falsehood. How are we to collect, how to produce, how to examine, the originals? Many books are so scarce, so sequestered in private hands, or in the mansions of the great, that even the keen eyes of lucriferous booksellers cannot find them. And if they cannot, who the deuce can?

I suppose it takes a life-time of reflection and thought to move a writer in a certain direction.