Here’s my unsolicited advice to any aspiring screenwriters who might be reading this: Don’t ever agonize about the hordes of other writers who are ostensibly your competition. No one else is capable of doing what you do.
We believe in the wrong things. That’s what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We’re just so damn good at reading them wrong.
There ought to be some sign in a book about man, that the writer knows thoroughly one man at least.
The thing about reading is that if you are hooked, you’re not going to stop just because one series is over; you’re going to go and find something else.
When I went to school, I was already reading and writing. In fact, I was offended that the other kids couldn’t.
I have always loved ‘Stig of the Dump.’ I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.
Robert Frost really started this whole thing rolling. He was, I believe, the first poet who started going to colleges. Before that, poets didn’t give public readings very often, certainly not – there was no circuit of schools.
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow...
Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.
I think it is shocking that 15- and 16-year-olds leave school unable to add up and with the reading ability of a four-year-old.
I don’t like reading things that people say on the Internet because I know so much of it is not true. I don’t want to waste my time worrying about what other people are thinking. I just want to focus on being able to do cool projects.
The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs.
The future of English fiction may rest with this Unknown Public – a reading public of three millions which lies right out of the pale of true literary civilization – which is now waiting to be taught the difference between a good book and a bad.
When in reading we meet with any maxim that may be of use, we should take it for our own, and make an immediate application of it, as we would of the advice of a friend whom we have purposely consulted.
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.
Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.
A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.
My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
When I was 5 years old, my mother read me ‘Gone With The Wind’ at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.