"I speak Urdu quite a lot, too, and I read a lot of Persian."

Reading, Read

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"I speak Urdu quite a lot, too, and I read a lot of Persian."

Exlpore more Reading quotes

"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

Reading, Escape, Story, Reality

"When someone tells me to 'just relax,' I wonder why they don't hand me a book?"

Richelle E. Goodrich, American Poet

Reading, Happiness, Today, Wisdom, Truth

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Novelist

Reading, Writing

"Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw."

David Mitchell, British Novelist

Reading, Books, Mind, Escape, Suffering

"He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule."

Seneca, Roman Philosopher

Reading, Read, Statesman, Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"With a book he was regardless of time."

Jane Austen, British Writer

Reading, Books, Time, Passion, Escape

"I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it."

David Foster Wallace, American Writer

Reading, Knowledge, Books, Curiosity

"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Reading, Joy, Books, Passion

"Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect."

S. A. Tawks, British Author

Reading, Impact, Culture, Imagination

"Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it."

Stephen King, American Author

Reading, Time, Distraction, Television

Explore more quotes by Juan Cole

"Take the decision in early March to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr. It was made apparently without knowledge or understanding of the nature of his movement or how widespread it is."

Nature

"Did you know that they introduced the 15 percent flat tax on individual and corporate income in Iraq? Something that some politicians very much wanted to push in the United States without success but in Iraq they do it."

Success

"Administering another country is always a very tricky proposition."

Nation

"My main expertise is in the past, but if I have to extrapolate into the future, I would say: no good news any time soon and an obvious exit strategy is not apparent to me."

Time

"I also argued before the war that the administration was underestimating Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism, that it was not going to be as easy to rule Iraq as they thought."

War

"An occupying power has no right to make significant alterations in the character of the occupied society, to change the laws all around, without a strong security reason and so forth."

Change

"Public interest in most of the Middle East was slight at that time; the Arab-Israeli conflict was all that people were interested in and that was not my specialty."

Time

"For instance, I was a little surprised that the Shiites didn't rise up against Saddam and the Baath party across most of the country when the Americans moved in March and April of 2003."

Shiites

"Partisan politics has no place in the classroom."

Politics

"I argued that the Bush administration, and the Coalition officials more recently, didn't understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate, that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs."

Society