We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There’s simply no way to write well, though, if you’re not reading well.
The happiest moments for me, creatively, are doing readings of a play around a table where there’s no audience.
I write plays, and I have a musical that’s starting to get produced now. That’s what I would love to do, but it’s so hard. The only reason people are reading my plays and musicals is because I’m in movies.
Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I’d been reading.
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.
I pluck up the good lissome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory.
The problem for me is that reading is, I won’t say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act.
Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.
Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that’s an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
I think, especially when you’re in college, each book that you’re reading tends to tell you who you are.
Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
Was a fast easy reading, Good to take your mind off of anything serious for a while.
We always talk about how everyone is unifocal. You can’t possibly be interested in jazz and Beethoven. Of course you can. You can’t both be reading a newspaper and be online. Of course you can. We shouldn’t be obsessed with a gun to your head, ‘You either read a newspaper or die!’
Most plays that are missed by the umpire are caused by the umpire not reading those cues early enough and making the proper adjustments.
Game management is accomplished by staying constantly alert and then reading and reacting to potential problem situations before they materialize. It all boils down to paying attention to details.
Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.
I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch I’ll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.