Reading Quotes | Beyond Motive 2/7

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Reading Quotes

"It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything."

Joseph Brodsky, American Poet

"I'd be interested to read Gull's paper on it, and I wish Alan would put it in somewhere. It gives him a relevance to our times, which he doesn't otherwise have. Gull, I mean, not Alan."

Eddie Campbell, Scottish Artist

"If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it."

Dean Koontz, American Author

"In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read."

Harold Bloom, American Critic

"I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading."

Charles Kuralt, American Journalist

Reading, Writing

"You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else."

Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish Writer

"We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading."

Thom Gunn, British Poet

"He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule."

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman Statesman

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

Leslie Fiedler, American Critic

Reading, Reason, Talk, Worth

"I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it."

David Eddings, American Author

"I was encouraged to read aloud in class and vocalize."

Bob Edwards, American Journalist

"I've already figured out when I'm going to be No. 2 and No. 1."

Sheldon Adelson, American Businessman

"I have been reading scripts, going to auditions and looking for the right opportunities."

Kevin Richardson, American Musician

"One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since."

Beverly Cleary, American Author

"I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us."

Helen Dunmore, British Poet

Reading, Progress, Poems, Poets

"There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry."

Rita Dove, American Poet

Reading, Poetry, Congress, Rest

"And it's impossible for me to read Henry James."

Norman MacCaig, Scottish Poet

"All over the country, they're reading about me, and the story doesn't center on me being gay. It's just about a gay person who is doing his job."

Harvey Milk, American Politician

Reading, Being, Country, Gay, Job

"There is no such thing as national advertising. All advertising is local and personal. It's one man or woman reading one newspaper in the kitchen or watching TV in the den."

Morris Hite, American Businessman

Reading, Advertising, Kitchen, Man

"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

Moses Hadas, American Writer

Reading, Experience, Knowledge, Passion

"The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it."

Robert Creeley, American Poet

"The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten."

Frederik Pohl, American Writer

"No two persons ever read the same book."

Edmund Wilson, American Critic

"I reach my readers regardless of what the critics have written."

Irwin Shaw, American Novelist

"Whatever I know how to do, I've already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do."

Eduardo Chillida, Spanish Sculptor

"I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library."

Beverly Cleary, American Author

"Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already."

Raymond Chandler, American Writer

"We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready - even eager - to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it."

Daniel J. Boorstin, American Historian

"The inevitable has always found me ready and hopeful."

Amelia Barr, American Novelist

"I read a lot, but I read about the areas that I'm interested in."

Sanford I. Weill, American Businessman

"Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts."

Mary Harris Jones, American Activist

"Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere."

Mary Schmich, American Journalist

"Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread."

Jimmy Carter, American President

"When you are already in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to get there."

Ram Dass, American Psychologist

"The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work."

Donna Tartt, American Novelist

Reading, Work, Listening, Practice

"The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable."

Anatole Broyard, American Critic

Reading, Talking

"If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?"

Charles de Lint, Canadian Writer

"He looked like such a Republican. He dressed like Pee-Wee Herman. But had I known what he had done when I was reading about him, I might have thought different."

Matthew Bright, American Director

Reading, Thought, Republican

"There were rumors I wasn't going to die. The whole cast was sitting around the table reading the script. I fell on the floor - I'm not kidding. I looked up at Katherine Heigl, and she was crying."

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, American Actor

Reading, Rumors

"German readers are much like Brits or Americans: They read for the thrill of it, the occasional shudder down the spine, knowing it's not real - but looking over their shoulders anyway, just in case."

Brian Lumley, English Writer

"Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own."

Arthur Schopenhauer, German Philosopher

Reading, Thinking

"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."

John Irving, American Novelist

"By reading a lot of novels in a variety of genres, and asking questions, it's possible to learn how things are done - the mechanics of writing, so to speak - and which genres and authors excel in various areas."

Nicholas Sparks, American Author

Reading, Questions, Variety, Writing

"The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author."

Jerzy Kosinski, Polish Novelist

"What I was reading was already part of my psyche, but finally someone else was saying it's okay to walk alone."

Charlie Trotter, American Celebrity

Reading, Saying

"I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed."

Jack Vance, American Author

"Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day."

Thornton Wilder, American Novelist

Reading, Work, Day, Hearing

"I have never read a line of Walt Whitman."

Mary MacLane, Canadian Writer

"And I tell ya, when I sit in that sound booth and started reading the script and starting to get into the character, man, it's an easy jump for me, because I understand what it's all about."

Lawrence Taylor, American Athlete

Reading, Character, Man, Sound

"I write early in the morning, usually after reading portions of at least half a dozen newspapers on the web."

Alan Dean Foster, American Author

Reading, Newspapers

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