Reading Quotes - Page 237

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

It took a lot to understand that the interest in both writing a story and reading it is not in the objective dangers someone takes. You don't have to fight snakes or wake up in a strange apartment to have a story; it's about what goes on inside your mind and soul.

Most of them were murderers. But when I went there to talk, they were the nicest people. I did a reading. I said, "Thank you," and then they said to me, "Could you talk some more?" And I said, "Why?" and they answered, "Most of us are in solitary confinement, so the moment you finish talking, they take us back to our cells. We like hanging out here together."

I fell into politics by accident. It was not something I planned. It just happened because I'd done so much reading and work in the community, I was prepared to do the job when the opportunity came along.

In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers' books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.

I'm always reading books-as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.

Grandma told me Mama was once caught by the Principal for writing in the front of her book, "In Case of Fire, Throw This in First." I have never had so much respect for Mama as the day I heard this.

The fact that people are already reading and loving something I wrote is still hard to believe.

The boy spends most of his time reading. And writing, of course. He copies out sections of books, writes out words and symbols he does not understand at first but that become intimately familiar beneath his ink-stained fingers, formed again and again in increasingly steady lines.

I study harder now than I ever did in college or high school. There's just so much pressure to know what's going on, and I feel like, especially with social media, there's always new information coming out on the teams, the players, the coaches, and the games. You can never be fully read enough, and I'm just constantly reading articles, watching games, and trying to read blogs.

If you think reading a book is hard, you should try writing one. Because it's even harder. It's still not as hard as writing a game, though. If you discount the purely visual pop-up parts, a book is made almost entirely of words. As a novelist, you just need to think of a few decent strings of words and then fill the other 98% of the book with more or less random descriptions of things and exclamation points.

The Internet will not become a money machine until the banking industry figures out how to transfer money for free so you can charge USD 0.005 (half a cent) for some simple service like, say, reading a newspaper article you have searched for. With today's payment system, the cost of the transfer of the funds completely dwarf the cost of the service paid for. ... This situation, however, is what acutely prevents the Internet from taking off as a network for paid services.

Reading Mission to Paris is like sipping a fine Chateau Margaux: Sublime!

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

It's most useful to think about not jobs but tasks. And within any given job, there are lots of different tasks. If you're a radiologist maybe reading the images machines can be able to do that better, maybe making the broader diagnosis and communicating it to the patients.

I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.

Reading allows you to go into a space that nothing else can take you to.

Reading allows us to learn, see, do things that we could never have done with our own knowledge.

There are times it's the only thing I want and I wonder how I'll ever go back to the world of noise and distraction. Other times, silence allows me to hear what's really going on in my head. Part of the reason we're on our phones or watching television or reading magazines is to give our heads something else to listen to other than our own thoughts.

Reading Alan Zweibel makes me laugh out loud. And yet it is not a particularly funny name.

There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect.

I do believe in reading signs if they're really obvious to you. Things happen. Someone will say something to you today in the morning and then later on that day someone will mention the same thing and then the next day someone will mention it again. There's a reason why three people have said something within twenty four hours.