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Reading Quotes


"Any book which is at all important should be re-read immediately."


"Noting that Huckleberry Finn was originally both valued and reviled because it shows the reader that the accepted moral code and social hierarchy is not always correct."


"When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like."


"I, of course, wanted to do something with Drew Barrymore. Please. So we were reading scripts back and forth and then we found this script, Fever Pitch."


"I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat."


"In some areas I am more noted for reading then I am for cookies!"


"I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading."


"I was encouraged to read aloud in class and vocalize."


"The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it."


"Whatever I know how to do, I've already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do."



"German readers are much like Brits or Americans: They read for the thrill of it, the occasional shudder down the spine, knowing it's not real - but looking over their shoulders anyway, just in case."


"What I was reading was already part of my psyche, but finally someone else was saying it's okay to walk alone."


"The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them."


"I wanted to portray very, very dark subject matter and a deceptively complex story in the brightest colours and simplest lines possible to leave the readers reeling."


"I have proved by actual trial that a letter, that takes an hour to write, takes only about 3 minutes to read!"


"Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems."


"I'm also looking for gems that the average reader might have missed."


"I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book."


"I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned."


"And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing."


"With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how."


"When you read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before."


"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."


"I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive."


"Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers."


"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it."


"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."


"Here we have been sitting down for a brief moment and you are already asking me if there are pictures of me in my drawers."


"It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)."


"It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections."


"What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it."


"I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book."
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