Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Green

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

John Green

Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.

Patti Smith

I got my style from a lot of different people, even my style of reading, even Johnny Carson inspired me.

Patti Smith

I'm from South Jersey: The idea of eating a roll with olive oil and anchovies or some kind of sardine and drinking mint tea definitely comes from reading Paul Bowles.

Patti Smith

It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing.

Paul Engle

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the "N th" power.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Gardening is certainly the next amusement to reading.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Making verses is almost as common as taking snuff, and God can tell what miserable stuff people carry about in their pockets, and offer to all their acquaintances, and you know one cannot refuse reading and taking a pinch.

Mary Wollstonecraft

For any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank still a blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers; besides, even the productions that are only addressed to the imagination, raise the reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites, to which the mind has not given a shade of delicacy.

Marshall McLuhan

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

Mark Gatiss

I always compare reading anything on the Internet to listening at doors. If you don't want to hear anything bad about yourself, you should never do it.

Paul Rudd

There are lots of things that you can go down the list and say, "Oh, these are cliches, we've seen this before, just hits every checkpoint." All of that takes a secondary status for me if I'm reading something and I just really like the characters.

Michael Wilbon

I'm 52 years old, which means I'm of an age where my reading habits are more or less set. I read plenty of stuff on line but I rely on pretty traditional sources. I'm a newspaper reader, whether in hand or on my iPad.

Michael Wilbon

The coverage [of crimes] is different. It's less angry when white [athletes] are involved, less accusatory, less judgemental. I see that in the pieces that are written and reported. At times it bothers me to the point that I just stop reading...just stop.

Michel de Montaigne

I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.... It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.

Michel de Montaigne

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

Michael Kimmelman

Drawing used to be a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.

Markus Zusak

Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.

Mark Leyner

Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.

Sometimes I imagine a surveyor 100 years from now reading my plan, retracing my boundaries, and finding the monuments that I set. It's an honor to make a mark in history like that.

Land surveyors can spend as much time reading legislation, bylaws, and engineering documents as we spend in front of an instrument in the field or calculating coordinates for a subdivision. We are mathematicians, historians, project managers, advocates, engineers, and even chainsaw operators!

Mario Benedetti

I do not write for the reader to come, but for him who is here, short of reading the text on my shoulder.

Mario Batali

Reading is a key feature in the life of every single successful person I have ever met.

Freddie Hubbard

Man, you'd be surprised how much I'm learning - not only about myself, but about the musicians who came before me. You don't realize at first when you listen to Armstrong's records how great this man was and how hard that Hot Five music was to play. After the experience of reading and playing those parts, I have an even greater respect for Louis Armstrong than before

Freddie Highmore

I always tend to see, right after reading the script, the character and how I want to play it. I guess that's sort of most of the work, preparing for the role, but almost the creation of the character seems to go on as I read through the script.

Freddie Mercury

I haven't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things. For example, when we're backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowds begins, it doesn't affect me the way in which it did for Freddy [sic] Mercury who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd, which is something I totally admire and envy.

Frank Muir

The golden rule when reading the menu is, if you cannot pronounce it, you cannot afford it.

George Carlin

When I'm not actually doing my work, I'm planning it or thinking about it or reading things that on some level are transformed into performance fantasies. I have no active interests. I never go anywhere or do anything that transports me outside the boundaries of my mind.

Christopher Hitchens

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

Christopher Darden

It would have been easier to have a male protagonist, but I didn't want people to assume that Nikki Hill was me in her entirety because a lot of people just don't like me and I don't think they would be interested in reading about me, even in the fictional context.

Christian Lous Lange

The simultaneous reactions elicited all over the world by the reading of newspaper dispatches about the same events create, as it were, a common mental pulse beat for the whole of civilized mankind.

Chris Matthews

I'm reading Joe Eszterhas biography; it's fabulous. Every time he made a movie, he fought with the director or the producer over the ending.

Gilbert Highet

The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.