Reading Quotes - Page 146

What made me want to be on it was reading a really good script, and being compelled by and attracted to the characters. I really loved Maura Isles, who was very fascinating to me.

It is a bit more challenging for the simple fact that now the stories I am writing are relying more on my imagination than on facts, more on research than on memory; so it is basically a slower writing process, more reading, more exploring. On the other hand, this approach is a little bit relieving too, since many times while writing [How the Soldieer Repairs the Gramophone] I felt too close and equal to my character.

I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.

Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.

The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.

When we started publishing, you had to be better than good. You had to be excellent. But as long as people are reading, I don't care what they're reading.

I think that my love of cooking grew out of my love of reading about cooking. When I was a kid, we had a bookcase in the kitchen filled with cookbooks. I would eat all my meals reading about meals I could have been having.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

I started reading all these men's magazines, trying to follow all the tips: what you're supposed to wear, what you're supposed to have, things you're supposed to say, and all the exercises you're supposed to do.

A children's biography doesn't have to be comprehensive, and it doesn't have to be definitive. It does have to be accurate, to the extent that's possible. And most of all, it has to be a piece of literature, a compelling read. I want the reader to discover the joy of reading.

Stormy Weather is really wonderful - it ought to be required reading for everyone who is concerned about our planet's climate, beginning in every high school in the country.

I'm jackin' off reading Playboy on a hot afternoon, I'm a three time loser.

I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

All parents want to send their children to the best possible schools. But because a good school is a relative concept, a family cannot achieve its goal unless it outbids similar families for a house in a neighborhood served by such a school. Failure to do so often means having to send your kids to a school with metal detectors at the front entrance and students who score in the 20th percentile in reading and math. Most families will do everything possible to avoid having to send their kids to a school like that. But because of the logic of musical chairs, they're inevitably frustrated.

People who are reading my books, or who are thinking about it, have some general idea about the concept of strategy. They're better off than somebody that has none. So I would never say it's useless.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.

One of my favorite books [The Stand] of all time. I grew up reading it.

I was not familiar with the book [before filming in The Outsiders] , though. Interestingly, The Outsiders had not reached the point where it is now, where it's required reading in sixth and seventh grades. In my sixth and seventh grade, we did not, but today everyone does.

[The Outsiders] was all new to me. It's been fun to be a part of that ride, where it's become on the level of Catcher In The Rye in terms of people's required reading in schools.

She might even be your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment. Look carefully at that teacher. Perhaps she is smiling at the absurdity of such a suggestion. Don't let that put you off. It could be part of cleverness. I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But--here comes the big "but"--not impossible.

I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.

If I looked at some of these pieces as if this project was not spoken-word but just short anthology, I probably would have fussed with some of the sentences, you know? Syllabication and prosody and such crap. Because the printed word is etched in stone. But for reading purposes I accepted this book of texts in the manner in which I wrote them, no need to fuss. Most of the shorter stuff was written as poetry. Meaning lots of white space on the page.