Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jonathan Evison

Reading is, at its best, not an escape; it is genuine experience. A novel is not a monologue, but a conversation, a collaboration between writer and reader, an invaluable exchange of human conditions.

Jon Stewart

Oh my god... Kerry is boring even when Bush is reading him.

Joyce Carol Oates

Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?

Joyce Carol Oates

I am always reading or thinking about reading.

Joyce Carol Oates

I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

Joyce Carol Oates

My first love was reading, which inspired me to write.

Joyce Carol Oates

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

Joyce Carol Oates

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

Joyce Carol Oates

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

Joyce Carol Oates

I am more or less reading all the time.

Kate Winslet

es, I spend a lot of time in Reading because we live in Oxfordshire and so we're always just in and out of each other's houses. It's very much the family that it always has been. But there's no comparison with Hollywood as such.

Kate Bernheimer

As a reader, coming to my reading as a writer immersed in fairytales, I cant help but notice in so many stories, plays, poems that I read, the sort of breadcrumbs of fairytale techniques, so Im very excited when I notice that.

Kate Bernheimer

The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog-undervalued and undermined-even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading.

Kate Atkinson

Sylvie’s knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, ‘The sign that one has acquired one’s learning from reading novels rather than an education…

Richard Dawkins

It's a flaw in our argument, for sure. By any reading of evolutionary theory, creationists ought to have died out ages ago. They serve no function in the planet's ecosystem, and no other species has survived so long while in such fundamental disagreement with observable reality. If I wasn't such an ardent believer in secular materialism, I'd wager this is really troubling Darwin in the afterlife.

Richard Dawkins

Part of the appeal was that Medawar was not only a Nobel Laureate, but he seemed like a Nobel Laureate; he was everything one thought a Nobel Laureate ought to be. If you have ever wondered why scientists like Popper, try Medawar's exposition. Actually most Popperian scientists have probably never tried reading anything but Medawar's exposition.

Richard Dawkins

We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.

Richard Wyckoff

Successful tape reading is a study of Force; it requires ability to judge which side has the greatest pulling power and one must have the courage to go with that side.

Richard Wright

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Richard Whately

Those who relish the study of character may profit by the reading of good works of fiction, the product of well-established authors.

Richard Avedon

My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues. But whenever I become absorbed in the beauty of a face, in the excellence of a single feature, I feel I've lost what's really there been seduced by someone else's standard of beauty or by the sitter's own idea of the best in him. That's not usually the best. So each sitting becomes a contest.

Rebecca West

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

Russell Banks

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

Russell Crowe

If I don't get the goose-bump factor when I'm reading it than I can't do it.

Russell Crowe

Some of the things you read you get an immediate reaction to so I've stopped reading things now. I do worry about my family though. Some people do try some nasty things to get at them and try and get a reaction from them.

Roy Wood

I've always been that way. I'm not very good at reading music but I'm pretty quick at picking things up.

Rose Macaulay

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.

Umberto Eco

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

Umberto Eco

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

Tyler Hilton

Kids think books are cool, especially when they see that people they think books are cool are reading.

Trudi Canavan

I still recommend reading travel guides as an insight to a travellers perspective on fantasy worlds. Nearly all characters end up travelling at some point, and they have many of the same needs and concerns covered in travel guides.

Troy Polamalu

I have read the Bible many times. But after fasting, and being baptized Orthodox, it's like reading a whole new Bible. You see the depth behind the words so much more clearly.

Truman Capote

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.