I was quite fortunate to have an AP English teacher my senior year of high school that understood this advice, and expounded on it often. I recall that he boiled it down to one simple line:
Garbage in, garbage out.
What he meant by that was that it's not enough to simply read. You have to read high quality literature if you want to become a writer. You can't expect to read nothing but news, comic books, National Lampoon, MAD magazine (and in our era, blogs) and become a good writer. It just doesn't work that way. It's like trying to get physically healthy by eating junk food.
“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. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” - Faulkner
Yeah, I'm familiar with that quote but as great of a writer as he was, I don't think Faulkner was right about this. To extend his carpentry analogy, if all you read is pulp then you are going to become a pulp producer as a writer.
Well, there's no accounting for taste. Chuck Berry, the famous rock and roller who wrote "Johnny B. Goode" saw that song get outsold by a throwaway novelty song he also wrote called "My Ding-a-Ling."
The masses may have poor taste, but writers are supposed to have higher aspirations. Writers are not the consumption public, no matter how much they try to cater to them. The writer is called to a higher standard. We are not "content creators."
Garbage in, garbage out.
What he meant by that was that it's not enough to simply read. You have to read high quality literature if you want to become a writer. You can't expect to read nothing but news, comic books, National Lampoon, MAD magazine (and in our era, blogs) and become a good writer. It just doesn't work that way. It's like trying to get physically healthy by eating junk food.