Reading Quotes - Page 144

My rule has been, so far as I could have any rule (I could have no cast-iron rule) - my rule has been, to write what I have to say the best way I can - then lay it aside - taking it up again after some time and reading it afresh - the mind new to it. If there's no jar in the new reading, well and good - that's sufficient for me.

I think my brain is full of collisions and that's how I like to read and process information. I'm always comparing things and I think I do that subconsciously when I'm reading books of poetry.

I am always reading, always, and tons of things at once. I wouldn't say I'm a voracious reader, though. I never finish books that fast, because I'm always reading so many things at once.

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it's said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions.

Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

Today I realize that many recent exercises in "deconstructive reading" read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity.

Reading recent history is good to humble yourself, and also to feel some hopefulness that there is progress.

People are more easily manipulated when they don't have information. If you ensure that kids grow up without basic reading skills, math skills, and so forth, then you ensure that they can't act effectively.

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it.

I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song.

A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best.

Many things embarrass me, but reading isnt one of them. Im not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.

I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.

The Old Testament is my favourite science fantasy reading.

Most of Emily's backstory is written out between New Moon and Eclipse. I'm reading them as we're shooting the films. I haven't read Breaking Dawn yet. It's just too crazy. There's too much going on that you need a map. I just try to focus on one movie at a time. When we were doing New Moon press, people were already asking about Eclipse. I didn't read it until I was ready to go, so that it was fresh and I wasn't jumbled with all this other stuff.

Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.

For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.

From candlelight to early bedtime, I read.

Students of reading, writing and common arithmetick . . . Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history . . . should be rendered . . . worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

Well, I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.