Reading Quotes - Page 162

The Simpson's in Piccadilly has been turned into the largest bookstore in all of Europe! How can they fill it? All of these purpose-built Borders and Chapters and every new mall that goes up has a giant chain bookstore with a purpose-built author reading space, whoah, what's gong on there.

[When] Johnny Mnemonic was coming out and I realized that all the kids that worked in 7-11 knew more - or thought they knew more - about feature film production than I did. And that was from reading Premiere, that was from this change that came from magazines that treat their readers as players. Magazines that purport to sell you the inside experience.

If a book is worth reading at all, it is worth reading more than once. Suspense is the lowest of excitants, designed to take your breath away when the brain and heart crave to linger in nobler enjoyment. Suspense drags you on; appreciation causes you to linger.

That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose; it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes reading poetry seem more natural.

It is always easier to take the words of a Jesus, a Gandhi, a Marx, or a Confucius as constituting Holy Writ. This involves less reading, less study, less thought, less conflict, and less independent searching, but it also means less growth toward maturity.

You are currently experiencing desire; otherwise, you wouldn't be reading these words. Even if you are reading them at the behest of someone else, you are motivated by your desire to please that person. And if you stop reading, you will not do so because you have stopped desiring but because your desires have changed.

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.

Reading... there have been millions and billions and billions and gazillions of people that have lived before all of us. There's no new problem you could have - with your parents, with school, with a bully, with anything. There's no problem you can have that someone hasn't already solved and wrote about it in a book.

I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like William James. He's actually a pragmatist.

There is an awful lot of difference between reading something and actually seeing it, for you can never tell, till you see it, just how big a liar History is.

A foreigner coming here and reading the Congressional Record would say that the President of the United States was elected solely for the purpose of giving Senators somebody to call a horse thief.

I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like “Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn’t a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself”. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt.

For me, promotional thing about some new album coming out destroys a lot of the excitement of making records. Records, movies, books - they're not supposed to be like math books. The purpose of them is to kind of take us out of ourselves and give us some sort of alternate experience or respite. To try to maximize the relationship of listening to a record through promotion is like experiencing driving a car by reading about stimulus programs. It kind of defeats the purpose.

I am thrilled at most corners that I turn walking down the street, I'm thrilled by most pages I turn when I'm reading a book thinking of what it's going to show and what it's going to make possible for tomorrow.

As inherently franchise-altering as drafts are, as monumental as they can be in the sport's history, you still can't get past the fact that this is several hours of people wearing suits and reading names off a sheet of paper. The athletes' clothes are entertaining - though not as much as they once were - and there's a warmth you get from watching young men and their families have their dreams come true. But it's still just a televised committee meeting.

The key thing is, don't worry about if anyone is reading you or not. Figure out your voice and figure out what you want to write about, what you're good at, what you like doing.

I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.

The future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public - a reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of true literary civilization - which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad.

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.

What gunpowder did for war, the printing-press has done for the mind; and the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge.

We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.