I tend not to think about the reading public at all, or the business, when I’m writing.
Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other’s micro-expressions.
The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.
I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.
I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the ’60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.
What is Jordan that I should wash in it? What is the preaching that I should attend on it, while I hear nothing but what I knew before? What are these beggarly elements of water, bread, and wine? Are not these the reasonings of a soul that forgets who appoints the means of grace?
If readers understand that they do not understand what they are reading then they must possess an understanding which is superior to the meaning which caused that misunderstanding.
One more thing: don’t spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy!
It’s absurd to think of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you’re reading for a while.
So I grew up in a very book-friendly environment and my education as a writer was reading. I think that’s the best education. Reading, and taking from the people I admired.
I’ve been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history.
I’ve always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.
I’ve been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You’re sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you’ve read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.
I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.
I think I learned a lot from reading in general – even from reading badly written books.
I was lucky enough not to face any required summer reading lists until I went to college. So I still think of summer as the best time to read for fun.
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.