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"I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions."
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"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There is no other enjoyment like reading."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too."Are you, Joe?"Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"I'd love to be a saxophonist. I don't know why, but I pretend I'm the saxophonist when I listen to music. I have about as much chance playing the sax as I do learning how to fly."
Love
"I do small cameos here and there but nothing that requires more than a paragraph of talking, because I'm just an amateur. The movie is a whole different reality."
Nothing
"You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies."
Character
"If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing. Then it's a constant spreading out of that five minutes."
Beginning
"The kind of event on a conveyor belt that causes a fire occurs in a variety of industrial environments, not uniquely in coal environments."
Cause
"I think the definition of an artist is not necessarily tied into excellence or talent; an artist is somebody who, if you took away their freedom to make art, would lose their mind."
Art
"I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do."
Choice
"If you're writing a book that takes place in New York in the moment, you can't not write about 9-11; you can't not integrate it. My main character's view is the Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center. It doesn't have to take over, but it has to be acknowledged."
Character
"I write because I can't imagine not writing."
Writing
"I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions."
Reading
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