Reading Quotes - Page 125

I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing.

Our reading can affect our imaginations in ways of which we are not consciously aware. It is quite common...to re-read something after a gap of many years and realize that it has been there all along, without any memory of where it was first encountered. But it may have been working away all the time.

My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.

History is a continuum, it's not these separate moments. That's how we look at it. In the 1700s in Virginia before there were police officers - there were these groups of men who would wander the countryside - and if they saw a black man or a black woman they would presume that that black man or woman was a slave. If you didn't have the kind of pass that you were supposed to have, then you could be whipped, you could be enslaved, you could be taken into custody - even if you were free. And as I'm reading this I find myself thinking, "How is this any different from stop-and-frisk?"

The deep-read is when you get gut-hooked and dragged overboard down and down through the maze of print and find, to your amazement, you can breathe down there after all and there’s a whole other world. I’m talking about the kind of reading when you realize that books are indeed interactive. . . . I’m talking about the kind of deep-read where it isn’t just the plot or the characters that matter, but the words and the way they fit together and the meandering evanescent thoughts you think between the lines: the kind of reading where you are fleetingly aware of your own mind at work.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in their times.

Students learn best not by reading the Great Books in a closed room but by opening the doors and windows of experience.

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.

Reading, not just an escape, but an exercise in living.

I really didn't know much about theater. After I signed on, I started reading a lot of Sam Shepard plays just to brush up on my history and do some research.

Writing is a channeling of an individual experience; so is reading. That's what's so exciting about this art form - it's interactive.

I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited by it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

I am not a historian, but I find myself being more and more fascinated by history and now I find myself reading more and more about history. I am very interested in Napoleon, at the present: I'm very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on, and I think that as I age I am becoming more and more historical. I certainly wasn't at all in my early twenties.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.

Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right. Being frightened when you're not sure you're all right is a big difference.

I suppose you know where this country would be, where the world would be, if everyone who got depressed by the papers stopped reading them.

Adam Brown’s zest for life led him down a few dark alleys and more than one dead end. Kind-hearted and wild, Adam led a life that lacked direction. God, a woman, and the U.S. Navy gave it to him. FEARLESS is a love story...several love stories: a man for his woman, a warrior for his team, parents for kids, and soldiers for their country. There is no greater love than that a man lay down his life for his friends. Be warned—reading FEARLESS will change the way you see the world.

In reading the biographies of very successful men and women, one theme frequently surfaces: such people have a strong bias for action. Those who achieve high levels of success in some areas of life tend to take a LOT more action than those who settle for average or below average results.

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading.

I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.

Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.

Kids absolutely not reading. I think it's because they're so screen-oriented [TVs, computers, smartphones]. They do read - girls in particular read a lot. They have a tendency to go toward the paranormal, romances, Twilight and stuff like that. And then it starts to taper off because other things take precedence, like the Kardashian sisters.

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." -

Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.