Reading Quotes - Page 94

It wasn't a good idea to work on 'Naked' in the first months of a marriage. I was living apart from my wife in a flat overflowing with books I was reading for the part.

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

Over the past fifty years or so, scientists have allowed the conventions of expression available to them to become entirely too confining, too confining. The insistence on bland impersonality and the widespread indifference to anything like the display of a unique human author in scientific exposition, have transformed the reading of most scientific papers into an act of tedious drudgery.

After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag—the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.

In terms of the way people see me, it breaks down into two very clear and distinct groups: those who think they know me from reading the papers and those who really know me by reading my books.

We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

There are a number of people without whom I could not have written this book, but I hope you don't hold that against them. They are all fine people, and they had no idea how it would turn out.

I never stop running. I'm not one of the weenies who drop out just because the electoral college votes. I'm still in the race. I'm an extremely corrupt candidate and I stress that in case anybody in our reading audience is interested in sending me money.

I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.

Attention spans are changing. It's very noticeable. I am very aware that the kind of books I read in my childhood kids now won't be able to read. I was reading Kipling and PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare at the age of 11. The kind of description and detail I read I would not put in my books. I don't know how much you can fight that because you want children to read. So I pack in excitement and plot and illustrations and have a cliffhanger every chapter. Charles Dickens was doing cliffhangers way back when. But even with all the excitement you have to make children care about the characters.

I grew up poor in crappy situations various crappy situations. What kept me sane was reading and music. I had so many different literary tastes growing up, be it fiction like Stephen King or Piers Anthony or non-fiction like reading Hunter S. Thompson essays or reading the Beats. I was a huge fan of the Beat movement.

I'm afraid I wasn't much of a student, but my casual reading was enormous.

I do enjoy reading some science fiction.

The trouble today is that many Christians live in a kind of bubble of assumptions about what their Christianity means, especially if it places them comfortably among "the good guys," - assumptions that are likely to be drawn as much from folk-Christianity, surrounding political culture, popular pulp-books about the "End Times," or their favourite guru writer or therapist, than from sober and comprehensive reading of the Bible as a whole. Prophets and preachers have the unwelcome task of pricking that bubble with the sharpness of actual texts and teachings of the Bible itself.

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.

Reading any collection of a man's quotations is like eating the ingredients that go into a stew instead of cooking them together in the pot. You eat all the carrots, then all the potatoes, then the meat. You won't go away hungry, but it's not quite satisfying. Only a biography, or autobiography, gives you the hot meal.

One way of reading my life is that I have been in constant search for a father.

Sarah Palin - now don't laugh - is writing a book. Not just reading a book, writing a book. Actually, in the word of the publisher, she's 'collaborating' on a book. What an embarrassment! It's one of these 'I told you,' books that jocks do.

Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well.

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.

Isn't it wonderful how dogs can win friends and influence people without ever reading a book.

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.