Famous Quotes & Sayings

Stephen Spender

But reading is not idleness?it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.

Stephen Greenblatt

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

The actor who lets the dust accumulate on his Ibsen, his Shakspere [sic], and his Bible, but pores greedily over every little column of theatrical news, is a lost soul.

Miranda Cosgrove

The first time someone called me a role model, I remember thinking, 'What does that mean?' But I feel aware of it when I'm reading scripts.

Pearl S. Buck

People don't care to read what they already think or what any people think - they know all that well enough. They want to know what they ought to think.

Pauly Shore

I miss that process of getting the script and reading it and working on it. Every actor has their own way of memorizing their lines, and the whole process of starting to work with the other actors and the director, and doing rehearsals, and going to the location, and going through wardrobe.

Peter Robinson

I like newspaper stories that are incomplete, that give me room to imagine the rest. It's no good to me reading about something that's all neatly solved and wrapped up. That's why so many of my stories revolve around human psychology, around why someone commits a certain crime, or series of crimes. I don't profess to know the answers but I like to explore the possibilities.

Peter O'Toole

I'm a professional and I'll do anything - a poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act.

Pete Fountain

I was improvising before I was reading music. I was just trying to play things on the clarinet by ear. I think my ear is one of my greatest assets.

Pierre Trudeau

I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat.

Phyllis McGinley

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

Phyllis McGinley

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

Philip Pullman

Writing is tyranny ... but reading is democracy.

Philip Pullman

You don't read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.

Philip Pullman

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

Rachel Cohn

We believe in the wrong things. That's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

Queen Latifah

When it came time to be a professional rapper, I wouldn't sign anything without reading it. There was no way I was going to have people make decisions for me or wake up one day and find that I was broke because I never bothered to read a contract.

Teju Cole

Note-taking is important to me: a week's worth of reading notes (or "thoughts I had in the shower" notes) is cumulatively more interesting than anything I might be able to come up with on a single given day.

Teju Cole

The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it.

Randall Jarrell

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help.

Randall Jarrell

[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

Shoshannah Stern

Most of the time, I get auditions for deaf characters where the scene has them communicating in really convoluted ways, like reading lips from across the room when the other persons back is turned or having other people parrot what they say.

Shiri Appleby

I felt like Jason Behr and I had such a unique chemistry. He just walked in and we started reading together, it was just there

Shelley Berman

We teach reading, writing and math by [having students do] them. But we teach democracy by lecture.

Shannyn Sossamon

I'm reading and trying to find a television show that I really like, so I can start really working again and gain some momentum.

Seymour Papert

We should think about what we mean by literacy. If you say, "He's a very literate person," what you really mean is that he knows a lot, thinks a lot, has a certain frame of mind that comes through reading and knowing about various subjects.The major route open to literacy has been through reading and writing text. But we're seeing new media offer richer ways to explore knowledge and communicate, through sound and pictures.

Lewis Thomas

When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.

Leslie Fiedler

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

Leslie Jamison

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

Len Wiseman

I had no intention of replacing Arnold [Schwarzenegger]. There were a few things that made me want to do the movie. They were the script which had a different direction to it, and it was a chance to do a very different Quaid. I didn't read the short story until I went to college.Reading the story had a different effect on me of how I pictured him to be and the tone of the story was different. In the story, he's a bit more of an everyman.

Lemmy Kilmister

Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination.