Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carl Sagan

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.

Chad Harbach

The effects of MFA programs, and the rise of creative writing instruction more generally, are far more diffuse than people think. Even if you're a writer who has avoided institutions your whole life, you're still going to be reading a lot of writers who have MFAs, and are affiliated with universities.

Caroline Kennedy

People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.

Camille Paglia

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

Caitlin Moran

I have read more about Oprah Winfrey’s ass than I have about the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren’t spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey’s ass.

Bruno Tonioli

I think school is so important. I was good student. A rebel, but I did well in my studies. I don't close myself to anything. I liked reading and I still love learning. I loved history and German.

Bruno Tonioli

I love reading. I'm very much into history, novels, biographies and I have a wide range of thrillers.

Cathleen Schine

One really understands testicles after reading 'The Family Jewels,' and one is gratified.

Catherynne M. Valente

It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.

Catherynne M. Valente

Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

Carl Honore

Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free.

David Hume

Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.

Ben van Berkel

Ideas can come while reading a good novel.

Benicio Del Toro

I mean I like most of the films that I've seen that I've been in. Those are the kind of films that I like to see. Am I getting better at making choices? Well, I think I might be getting better at reading scripts. Does that make any sense?

Benicio Del Toro

Am I getting better at making choices? Well, I think I might be getting better at reading scripts.

Benedict Cumberbatch

I had a very sparse comic upbringing - not because I was being whipped into reading [Anton] Chekhov and [Charles] Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Because reading is one of the joys of life, and once you begin, you can't stop, and you've got so many stories to look forward to.

August Wilson

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

Audrey Hepburn

For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It's not the most social pastime.

Arnold Bennett

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

Arnold Bennett

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.

Antony Sher

Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.

Rachel Cohn

Why should I tell you?" he asked, with no small amount of petulance. "If you tell me, I will leave you alone," I said. "And if you don't tell me, I'm going to grab the nearest ghostwritten James Patterson romance novel and I am going to follow you through this store reading it out loud until you relent." Now I could see the fright beneath the defiance.

Diablo Cody

Here's my unsolicited advice to any aspiring screenwriters who might be reading this: Don’t ever agonize about the hordes of other writers who are ostensibly your competition. No one else is capable of doing what you do.

Dick Cavett

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there's not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.

Dennis Hopper

I was reading a lot of Thomas Jefferson at the time, and Jefferson said that every 20 years, if one party has stayed in power, it's your obligation as an American to vote the other party in.

Dennis Hopper

I was a Shakespearean actor, I had preconceived ideas, line readings - everything was a gesture, everything was conscious.

Dennis Miller

The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.

Denise Mina

People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.

Chinua Achebe

When I'm writing, I really want to satisfy myself. I've got a story that I am working on and struggling with, and I want to tell it the most effective way I can. That's really what I struggle with. And the thought of who may be reading it may be there somewhere in the back of my mind - I'll never say it's not there because I don't know - but it's not really what I'm thinking about.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

Cheyenne Jackson

I love Jane [Krakowski]. Jane's been a dear friend for maybe a dozen years. We've worked together on many shows and concerts and readings. We did Damn Yankees together and then we did Xanadu. Jane did all the workshops of Xanadu before it moved to Broadway. She's hysterical and our voices blended. We had a similar sensibility.