Reading Quotes - Page 74

Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Reading put perspective to any challenge I was facing and made me see that extraordinary people usually had extraordinary pain, difficulties or injustices. That's part of why they have the drive and hunger to do good in the world, to make something happen.

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.

I had literary interests my whole life. I decided at the age of five I was going to be a writer. So I had done a great deal of reading. I suppose I was more at home in Greenwich Village than, say, any of classmates from Warsaw High School. But in any case, it was an overwhelming experience for me. It took me some time to begin to assimilate it.

Success requires a persistent misreading of the odds.

Reading a script is usually as exciting as reading a boilerplate legal document, so when you read one that makes you feel as if you're seeing the movie, you know it's something different.

The Only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

War makes good history but peace is poor reading.

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

I have seen some astrologers who predicted wonderful things; but I have no reason to believe they predicted them only from the stars, or anything of the sort. In many cases it is simply mind-reading. Sometimes wonderful predictions are made, but in many cases it is arrant trash.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed-reading accident. I hit a bookmark.

You should always have 2 books...the one you're reading and the one you're writing.

Malcolm X educated himself in prison by reading.

Young people's reading choices are influenced by their peers.

It's strange to describe reading a book as a really great experience, but that's kind of how it felt.

In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

Read much, but not many works.

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren

A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.