Reading Quotes - Page 254

We don't want to read a book. We want to live an experience.

... the subjective viewpoint is the only one to use regarding a library. Your true library is a collection of the books you want.You may have deplorably poor taste or bad judgment. Never mind. Correct those traits before you exchange your books.

I view askance a book that remains undisturbed for a year. Oughtn't it to have a ticket of leave? I think I may safely say no bookin my library remains unopened a year at a time, except my own works and Tennyson's.

The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading.

I grew up in a household where reading was encouraged. My mother believed in the power of words, and my father obviously did too.

The fans [of Vampire diaries] that we have now are the people who will watch it any day of the week. So, my first instinct was a little bit of an ego tap, but the second I processed it, I was fine. The only weird thing will be maybe not having as many people live tweeting because they're actually out doing something more interesting on Friday night. I'm not going to sit at home, reading Twitter on Friday night.

I get letters from readers who say that they have always hated reading, but somebody suggested one of my books, they actually finished the book and enjoyed it, and they're going on to read another book. I'm thrilled that they have figured out that reading is fun

The six and one-fourth hours' television watching (the American average per day) which non-reading children do is what is called alpha-level learning. The mind needn't make any pictures since the pictures are provided, so the mind cuts current as low as it can.

I'm never sure who I'm writing for, or who's reading me, but I definitely see myself in conspiracy with my readers.

I don't want to just be an athlete. I kind of obsess on that sometimes. I don't want my son to be reading, oh, 'disappointment, just a scorer, selfish, didn't win enough, never quite the best' -- whatever. I want to be bigger than that. I want to shape my own destiny instead of just having him read about whatever on the back page.

You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

I haven't been reading anything on tour so far, I haven't had a minute. Any moment that I've had recently on the tour has been completely sleeping. But before I left home I was reading Dylan Thomas' book of collected works of poetry. I read a lot of poetry.

What was once a cottage industry dedicated to the discovery and development of new voices and works has become instead the raison d'etre for many a playwright's existence . . .. And since readings have become playwrights' main source of exposure, the nature of playwriting has changed to fit readings' needs. Investigation into what is eminently theatrical has been substituted - more and more these days - by what can simply come across and read well.

It was in reading Tristam Shandy that I noticed how it is primarily men who gravitate towards the game-playing self-reflexive style. There is an alienation from emotion in it, a Nervous Nelly fear of letting go and being "exposed." As an attitude towards life, it betrays a perpetual adolescence. Those who hurled themselves after Derrida were not the most sophisticated but the most pretentious, and least creative members of my generation of academics.

I write constantly, but only in my journals. I have three of them: one for travel, one for home, and one I write in before bed. But the last thing I want is other people reading it... What's really fun is reading your journal, like a year later.

I write a lot. I used to write a lot of poetry when I was younger, write for my school newspapers. Also reading is very important because you need to be on your word game if you want to be a lyricist.

I have read more about Oprah Winfrey’s ass than I have about the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren’t spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey’s ass.

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

One of the most important elements of Caio-ness I wanted to keep was that left to right reading, where one form draws you... this movement in what is otherwise a fairly still art, that sense of pulling the eye. It involves a sense of time. To me that's esoteric and magical and playful, and if a painting doesn't have that, to me it's just canvas and paint. If it does have that, then it rises above its materials.

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.

It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one's adult enjoyment of what are called 'children's books.' I think the convention a silly one. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty-except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all. A mature palate will probably not much care for crème de menthe: but it ought still to enjoy bread and butter and honey.

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century [...] lies where we have never suspected it [...] The only palliative is [...] by reading old books. [...] the books of the future would be just as good [...], but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.