Famous Quotes & Sayings

John McGahern

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

If you want to be a fiction writer, you need to start reading like a fiction writer. To do so, you need to learn about craft so that the next time you pick up a contemporary short story, you're reading it not as an abstraction floating in formaldehyde, existing simply for the theorist's dull scalpel to saw on, but as a concrete thing constructed out of words and shaped by syntax, brought to life by a writer who made several thousand choices, some large, some small, before letting that imperfect beauty, the story, walk on its own two feet.

Luke Grimes

I like reading for things. I've shown up for jobs before where I haven't read for them, and there's something kind of intimidating about that - where the first words they'll hear from me are when they call "action." There's something about actually going in and earning a part and going, like, "Okay, they really liked what I did, and so I'm on the right track."

Lucas Till

Truthfully, in the beginning [of MacGyver] this could have gone either way, and as it turned out there was a version that was done wrong, which I'm not even going to get into. It was a pretty good idea and I liked where it was going, but then we got a chance to restart with Peter Lenkov [as executive producer/showrunner], who brought his vision to it. I remember reading his pilot script and it was just so exciting that I started hopping around my room.

Louise Jameson

It's a comedy thriller, brilliantly written and it's full of twists and turns at every page. When I was reading it I was desperate to get to the end to find out what happens, it really hooks you.

Louis Auchincloss

Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper--you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.

Lord Byron

One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer.

M. John Harrison

What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.

Malcolm Forbes

If you can read and don't, you're dumb.

Malcolm Gladwell

People who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.

Malcolm Gladwell

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

Malcolm Bradbury

Reading someone else's newspaper is like sleeping with someone else's wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it.

Maimonides

You must consider, when reading this treatise, that mental perception, because connected with matter, is subject to conditions similar to those to which physical perception is subject.

Gail Carson Levine

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

Frank Lampard

I loved reading Roald Dahl when I was young but I had forgotten a lot about the books. I read the 'BFG' on the iPad the other day and it was so interesting to see his descriptions of clothes and places.

Frank Lampard

Reading and writing is so important, and it's something I am really keen to promote. It's something that can be a bit lost these days with so much else going on.

Maggie Gallagher

The strongest results were in Florida and Texas. In just one year in a Texas charter school, an average student gained 7 percentile points in math and 8 percentile points in reading, while Florida charter schools improved student performance by 6 percentile points.

Holbrook Jackson

The end of reading is not more books but more life.

Holbrook Jackson

Books worth reading are worth re-reading.

Hayley Mills

I like solitary pursuits, such as reading or pottering about in the garden.

Ho Chi Minh

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

Henry R. Luce

Not much longer shall we have time for reading lessons of the past. An inexorable present calls us to the defense of a great future.

Henry Rollins

I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It's all these things that make reading so appealing to me.

Henry Rollins

I really like older writers, perhaps because they take me out of my element. I don't have a great deal of interest in reading a fictionalized present as it's pretty insane as it is.

Henry Ford

Reading musses up my mind.

Helen Oyeyemi

I always wanted to be a writer! But I wanted to do other things, too - be a psychologist, a librarian, et cetera. Now Ive decided that reading fiction that features characters who are in those professions will do.

Helen Oyeyemi

I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot.

Heinrich Heine

I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.

Hilary Mantel

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

Henry Ward Beecher

I read for three things; first, to know what the world has done the last twenty-four hours, and is about to do today; second, for the knowledge that I specially want in my work; and third, for what will bring my mind into a proper mood.

Henry Ward Beecher

Weak minds may be injured by novel-reading; but sensible people find both amusement and instruction therein.

Henry Ward Beecher

Men must read for amusement as well as for knowledge.

Henry Ward Beecher

Reading is a dissuasion from immorality. Reading stands in the place of company.