You ever talk about a movie with someone that read the book? They’re always so condescending. ‘Ah, the book was much better than the movie.’ Oh really? What I enjoyed about the movie: no reading.
I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.
A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil’s policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
One of my greatest pleasures in my writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the realization that such people rarely read.
Reading Stephen King’s book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema.
We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine – in fact one shudders to imagine – a child of today reading and enjoying it.
To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.
A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.
Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.
A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.
It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.
Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.
Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
Physically I’m tired at the end of the day and quite glad to be reading in bed by midnight.
Dust off that Bible. It has the answers you are looking for, and its delights await you.
And you can’t make a mistake when you are reading the Torah, so you have men standing around who will correct you if you are reading it incorrectly.
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.