To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful...
A lot of people believe in reading reviews. If I get too focused on some detail of what they’ve said about me, I’m going to end up shooting myself in the foot.
When I was 16, the guest speaker was King. And I was completely overwhelmed because I had been studying nonviolence, talking about it, reading about it, but here it was happening, here it was people boycotting the buses and people on the streets and taking risks, which I think was the key.
Literature has done great work for feminism – writing and reading are a practice of empathy – and great literature will continue to do so.
I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen – like the iPod Touch’s – although the pixel density could and should be much higher.
Sometimes, despite the fact that you’re reading through masses of material, you just can’t not think about a certain event, for it seems to capture the reality of the entire situation so much better than any set of statistics.
When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.
The Old Testament is my favourite science fantasy reading.
I really think that reading a whole script is kind of prying and neurotic, don’t you?
Why can’t people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?
Most people associate reading with laying on the beach. They don’t see that it’s crucial for a democracy!
When I was a little boy in Worcestershire reading history books I never thought I should have to interfere between a king and his mistress.
Television viewing has become for me a completely different experience, because I don’t watch shows on a weekly basis. I wait until the DVD or I TiVo everything and wait until the end of a season and watch it all over a weekend. For me that’s a really satisfying experience, like reading a book.
I’m always reading and looking around for the next thing.
I tend not to read the size of the production into a script when I’m reading it. It’s just something you respond to or not and I do think it’s very dangerous to say it’s time now to do this or it’s time now to do that.
I get caught up in my bubble of reading, writing, or music.
Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.
A lot of what the ‘Culture’ is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.