Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jonathan Lethem

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.

Jonathan Franzen

But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.

Jonathan Franzen

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

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…

Judith Martin

Life is full of wonderful passions that come and go over the years, but the only one that will never let you down is reading.

Josh Holloway

I get readings, I sometimes get five a week. You'll feel like a schizophrenic by the end of that week. I don't know who I am any more. You'll be in conversation with a friend and start spitting out dialogue.

Josh Hutcherson

What I think after reading the script and seeing where the story goes, I go with my instincts on the character. If my instincts are wrong the director and the producers will guide me in the right direction. That's just kind of how I take on any role, be it a fantasy movie or not.

Joseph Monninger

Fishing the small streams of New Hampshire is a pastime that combines hiking, map reading, and bushwhacking - plenty of it.

Katherine Center

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

James Madison

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

James Lipton

I love writing. I like reading, other people, not myself.

James Lipton

I would say that writing, both the act of writing, and of course reading of other people's work is, for me, supreme joy.

James Laughlin

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

James Laughlin

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

James Laughlin

I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.

Joe Queenan

Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable. Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky. As long as we have these epic, improbable reading projects arrayed before us, we cannot breathe our last: Tell the Angel of Death to come back later; I haven't quite finished Villette.

Joan D. Vinge

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Joan Didion

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

Joan Didion

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

Jim James

Reading is one of the greatest forms of magic available to us on the planet.