A finished person is a boring person.
Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.
All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.
I always have music on unless I’m reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It’s the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.
Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn’t read, I don’t know what I’d do. But as a writer, it’s both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along.
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
I’m reading a book, because I’m brainy. No, it is a book – if you don’t know, it is like a blog except bigger.
It’s tricky turning a book into a movie. Sometimes people love the book so much that no adaptation lives up to what they imagined. You can avoid that disappointment by never, ever reading books.
According to a new study, our email is not as safe as we thought. How do they know this? They’ve been reading my email.
The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren’t worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
I do not write for the reader to come, but for him who is here, short of reading the text on my shoulder.
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
Considering Adrian had once gotten bored while reading while reading a particularly long menu, I had a hard time imagining he’d read the Hugo book in any language.
When I was 8, I was reading ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and all that, not knowing it wasn’t my reading level.