Reading Quotes
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I write to get myself writing. That and read Wallace Stevens' "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" for the umpteenth time. Certain authors for me, certain books, just by reading a phrase I feel I can write.
Dan Chiasson
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The only thing better than good English writing is - I can't think of anything. You just don't pour it pureed over your potatoes. You savor it as if it were a find chardonnay. What on Earth does it matter if you stop and repeat a phrase, roll it around on your tongue, dart a few lines ahead and then suddenly come back and reread it? If the phrase is good enough, you are supposed to stop and rejoice in it.
William Murchison
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I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.
Chaim Potok
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My mother passed away when I was 14, so there were certain things I missed in terms of upbringing. Maybe my mother would have said, 'You have to get a real job.' I don't know because I didn't have that experience. My fortes in school were Spanish, sports, reading and theater. That's what they encouraged.
Joie Lee
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Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
Joan Didion
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I've gotten to try on voices very different than my own, and I've become much more aware of structure than ever before. Also, you really weigh every word. There's no closer reading then when you read to translate.
Achy Obejas
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Let it be a settled principle in our minds, in reading the Bible, that Christ is the central sun of the whole book. So long as we keep Him in view, we shall never greatly err in our search for spiritual knowledge. Once losing sight of Christ, we shall find the whole Bible dark and full of difficulty.
J. C. Ryle
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I'm not terribly well read. My wife forces books into my hands and insists I read them, which I'm grateful to her for. She made me read 'War and Peace.' The whole thing. It was amazing, but I had to hide it. You can't walk round reading 'War and Peace' - it's like you're in a comedy sketch and you think you're smart.
Peter Capaldi
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Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.
Susie Bright
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Sometimes the reading is related to something I do, sometimes it's not. I feel like every time I read something, there's a quote or something that comes into the work later. There's nothing that happens by coincidence. It's fate, I would say.
eL Seed
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Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, going for a walk, exercising, or listening to music, are hugely restorative.
Daniel Levitin
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Reading has always been in the chief joy, a never-ending topic of conversation, and often a lifesaver, in my family.
Elizabeth Borton de Trevino
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I do think poetry needs to invite the reader, especially when there are so many other distractions while reading.
David Starkey
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As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
Mary Oliver
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With theatre, you can interpret the most complex play on stage for it have meaning to an audience because you're dealing in images, you're dealing in action, you can use different idioms to interpret and clarify something which is obscured in the reading and of course there are different kinds of play, there are mythological plays, there are what I call the dramatic sketches, direct political theatre which is virtually everybody, but I find that you can use the stage as a social vehicle, you know, which any kind of audience.
Wole Soyinka
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I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.
Ernest Gaines
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I don’t even know what I’m writing, I have no idea, I don’t know anything, and I’m not reading over it, and I’m not correcting my style, and I’m writing just for the sake of writing, just for the sake of writing more to you… My precious, my darling, my dearest!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Reading centers on finding yourself in a book.
Anita Silvey
