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Reading Quotes

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Reading Quotes

“I grew up poor in crappy situations various crappy situations. What kept me sane was reading and music. I had so many different literary tastes growing up, be it fiction like Stephen King or Piers Anthony or non-fiction like reading Hunter S. Thompson essays or reading the Beats. I was a huge fan of the Beat movement.”

“I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry.”

“The rules for reading yourself to sleep are easier to follow than are the rules for staying awake while reading. Get into bed in a comfortable position, make sure the light is inadequate enough to cause slight eyestrain, choose a book that is either terribly difficult or terribly boring-in any event, one that you do not really care whether you read or not-and you will be asleep in a few minutes. Those who are experts in relaxing with a book do not have to wait for nightfall. A comfortable chair in the library will do any time”

“Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”

“Let it be a settled principle in our minds, in reading the Bible, that Christ is the central sun of the whole book. So long as we keep Him in view, we shall never greatly err in our search for spiritual knowledge. Once losing sight of Christ, we shall find the whole Bible dark and full of difficulty.”

“That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing. Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed. Something is always left--something dim and inaccurate--but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more. I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers.”

“Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Age. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.”

“I think that for a lot of actors - especially American actors - to get line readings and to be told and have your director literally act out the part for you is sort of discouraging in a way. It's a very Eastern European thing to do - a lot of directors that I worked with in Russia did that as well. And, I never took that as an insult, as many actors tend to do. To me, I think it's just offering a certain energy - offering their flavor - and, instead of trying to sort of decode and communicate it to you, they just show you their flavor of what it should be.”

“My general impression about people like Steve Gould and Carl Sagan and so on is that when they disappear as individuals and are no longer appearing on the stage and they are no longer writing, that their lifetime of acknowledgement by the general reading public is not very long... There were many people in the 19th century who were equally famous people who gave working man's lectures, supporters of Darwin, we as scholars know their names but the general public never heard of them.”

“I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.”

“Catholicism is the big house of Christianity. It's got many, many rooms in it. And I've always been attracted to the rooms which are to do with prayer. The mystical strain is the strain whereby the whole day can be given over to prayer through what we call lectio divina, prayerful reading of Scripture, through practice of meditation of when one uses the imagination and the intellect with respect to images, and then finally, and most difficult of all, contemplation, where one empties the mind of all images and all ideas, all concepts, in order to be completely attentive to God.”

“What I notice, as a historian reading stories about so-called nature miracles, the walking on the water, or the miraculous catch of fishes, they're done especially for the insiders, for the disciples. Usually healings and exorcisms are done for people along the road, as it were. Jesus doesn't come on the water to save the fishing fleet from Capernaum, he comes on the water to save the disciples. It's a parable, dummy, it's a parable, don't you get it? If the leadership of the church takes off in a boat without Jesus, it will sink, it will get nowhere.”

“I use music as something from which I obtain some form of - I hate to use the word spiritual - guidance, an awareness of something more than the day-to-day or the petty. I am not reading Emanuel Kant to try to embark on a task of seeing if I can understand myself, what the aesthetic experience is. But I wholeheartedly believe in it, even though I think not too many do nowadays.”

“I love doing the readings. The readings are the fun bits... The readings are probably the things that actually keep me going on these. If I couldn't do the readings, I wouldn't do the [signing] tours. I get to stand up there and read to a bunch of adults who in many cases nobody's read to in years, since they were about five. They just squat on the floor. That's enormously enjoyable.”

“I started reading Dickens when I was about 12, and I particularly liked all of the orphan books. I always liked books about young people who are left on their own with the world, and the four children's books I've written feature that very thing: children that are abandoned by their families or running away from their families or ignored by their families and having to grow up quicker than they should, like David Copperfield - having to be the hero of their own story.”

“I like reading books about kids where there weren't really many adults, where they didn't need an adult to come and solve the problems for them. They could use their own ingenuity, use their own talents to solve whatever the issue was. And I like that still. I think that children want to read about heroic children. They don't want to read about children that have to be saved all the time.”