Reading Quotes - Page 233

I was just a kid selling monster stories to the kids in the projects, complete with a dramatic reading, making the werewolf sounds. My career was aborted early on because one of my main customers started to have nightmares and his mother came to my mother and my mother shut down my whole business.

I always give my students exercises where they really have to open a vein and bleed all over the paper and that's the way you get the important characters. Sooner or later every writer worth reading writes a story his mother wouldn't read and having to get that stuff out is part of one's growth as a writer.

One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.

I am not going to get into it myself, except to say (1) if I am writing "boy fiction," who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings? and (2) thank you, geek girls! I love you all.

The great thing about reading is that it broadens your life

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?- How else? Though not till I'm done reading.

But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

I will find any excuse to go into somebody's study or ask them what they are reading. I can't think of too many other things that say what goes on in someone's head than the books they have.

I am reading "The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers and "Redeployment" by Phil Klay . Both Powers and Klay are Iraq War vets. Klay's stories are remarkable.

I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.

In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action.

Recently I was reading somewhere or other an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a 17th century crucifix to J.P. Morgan. Inside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion.

The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it.

There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling.

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.

I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.

When I'm not actually doing my work, I'm planning it or thinking about it or reading things that on some level are transformed into performance fantasies. I have no active interests.

When I'm not actually doing my work, I'm planning it or thinking about it or reading things that on some level are transformed into performance fantasies. I have no active interests. I never go anywhere or do anything that transports me outside the boundaries of my mind.

I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.

In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.

Mark Twain said (particularly about Pink Marsh): "I have been reading him again, and my admiration overflows all limits. ... How effortless the limning! It is as if the work did itself, without help of the master's hand."

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning . One orients one's attitude toward the either by or by what the world is. The former gives as much security as the latter, in that one knows how one stands.

Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.