Reading Quotes - Page 42

Some actors might just do one thing, and another actor does another thing. I do an awful lot of preparation with the script, really. What I do is repeat the script, over and over and over again. Through that, it's almost like it seeps into my enamel. I'm reading all the characters, as well as my own. That is where the bulk of my preparation goes into.

I'm in school every day. It depends on what it is that you do with all that free time when I'm not on the microphone. I'm reading, I'm studying. I love documentaries. I love learning what I don't know. And of course, I wouldn't suggest that particular lane for others.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

As I tell my intro creative writing students, after reading someone you love, wait at least an hour before starting to write.

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That’s why I read when I was a lonely kid and that’s why I read now that I’m a scared adult.

Children need far more than basic skills in reading, writing, and math, as important as those might be. Children also need to learn how to think for themselves, how to find meaning in what they learn, and how to work and live together.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.

You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer.

So long as readers keep reading and my publishers keep publishing, I plan to keep on writing. I'd have to be an idiot to be burnt-out in this job.

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

There is absolutely no way to increase your income quicker than reading 30 minutes a day

An acquaintanceship with the literature of the world may be won by any person who will devote half an hour a day to the careful reading of the best books. The habit of reading good books is one that gives great comfort in all the stages and among all the vicissitudes of life. The man who has learned to love good reading is never alone. His friends are the great ones of human history, and to them he may always go for stimulating and helpful communion. -GQ 71

The happiest moments for me, creatively, are doing readings of a play around a table where there's no audience.

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Arguing with people is like reading your e-mail at 4 in the morning. There is absolutely no good that can come of it. It's just scratching an itch.

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.

Reading with children is an enormous gift to them. It's a great honor to invite children to read with adults.

Books do not make life easier or more simple, but harder and more interesting.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.