Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if not more, which the day did not bring forth.

Henry David Thoreau

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

Henry David Thoreau

Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

Henry David Thoreau

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

Henry David Thoreau

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Henry David Thoreau

I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true; and they do not always mean what they say.

H. L. Mencken

There are two kinds of books. Those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is always a poor way of reading the hearts of others to try to conceal our own. [Fr., C'est toujours un mauvais moyen de lire dans le coeur des autres que d'affecter de cacher le sien.]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

Jill Scott

I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'

Jeremy Collier

A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading.

Jeremy Clarkson

I was reading The Mirror the other day and came across a letter from a reader who wrote, 'I was riding my bike to work when this red Ferrari pulled up next to me. Out of the window, Jeremy Clarkson shouted 'Get a car', and drove off.' What I actually said was, 'Get a car you hatchet faced, leaf-eating tw*t

Jennifer Connelly

I do finish reading a script and say, Why are they making it and what are they talking about? I like to try and be responsible in my choices in that way.

Jennifer Egan

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

Jennifer Egan

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.

Jennifer Egan

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,

Jennifer Egan

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

Jeff Vandermeer

My parents read to me a lot as a kid, and I started writing very early, probably spurred on by Aesop's fables. Then they gave me The Lord of the Rings way too early for me to fully understand what I was reading, which was actually kind of cool. It was almost better - comprehension's overrated when you're reading.

Jeff Vandermeer

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.

Jerry Spinelli

I love surprises! That's what is great about reading. When you open a book, you never know what you'll find.

Jerome K. Jerome

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

Jeffrey Jones

This outfit called Los Angeles Theatre Works does readings of plays.

Jeffrey Eugenides

I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.

Jeff Jarvis

The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

Jim Evans

Most plays that are missed by the umpire are caused by the umpire not reading those cues early enough and making the proper adjustments.

Jennifer Lawrence

You can't ever let yourself be thrown by a camera. That's never good for an actor. When you're reading the script, you want to work with someone you trust so there's nothing to worry about.

Jean M. Auel

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

James Cameron

I probably spend more time writing than reading science fiction. I find that science-fiction literature is so reactive to all the literature that's gone before that it's sort of like a fractal. It's gone to a level of detail that the average person could not possibly follow unless you're a fan. It iterates upon many prior generations of iterations.

James Agate

All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose.

James A. Michener

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.