Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dana Spiotta

I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

Curtis Sittenfeld

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.

Curtis Sittenfeld

I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.

Curtis Sittenfeld

I don't think it's shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing.

Curtis Sittenfeld

If I'm at somebody's house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.

Dave McKean

Reading a good comic is a creative act. Watching a film is often a more passive experience, and since I'm interested in engaging that conversational aspect of creativity, I'm trying to find ways of achieving that in my films.

Mark Steyn

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.

Kurt Vonnegut

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

Anne Lamott

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

Anne Lamott

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship

Anne Lamott

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

Alane Ferguson

Tokyo Heist is a fast-paced, exotic reading adventure, a story where The da Vinci Code meets the wildly popular manga genre! Author Diana Renn infuses protagonist Violet with plenty of chikara (power) and Renn's fresh, spot-on author's voice is irresistible. I couldn't put it down!

Alastair Reynolds

How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’ ‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.

Albert Bushnell Hart

'Good wine needs no bush', and if there were need to urge the reading of history it would be proof that history is too dull and unattractive to be read.

Albert J. Nock

As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

Annie Besant

Jeremiah is a most melancholy prophet. He wails from beginning to end; he is often childish, is rarely indecent, and although it may be blasphemy to say so, he and his 'Lamentations' are really not worth reading.

Annie Dillard

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

Annie Dillard

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Annie Dillard

Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?

Annabelle Selldorf

There's no architect who doesn't want to build a library - and I am no different. With so much scrutiny now attached to reading - because of technology and how we approach it as a social activity - that is a very exciting area in architecture.

Claire Danes

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

Claire Danes

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

Daniel J. Boorstin

There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'

Daniel J. Boorstin

By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.

D. H. Lawrence

A book lives as long as it is unfathomed.

A. E. Hotchner

He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.

A. C. Benson

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

Adrienne Rich

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

Agatha Christie

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

Adriana Trigiani

I even love the smell of books.

Adora Svitak

I was thrilled to be able to read at three. I just thought everyone loved reading as much as I did.

Cynthia Ozick

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.