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If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.
Terry PratchettI never need to find time to read. When people say to me, โOh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just donโt have time,โ Iโm thinking, โHow can you not have time?โ I read when Iโm drying my hair. I read in the bath. I read when Iโm sitting in the bathroom. Pretty much anywhere I can do the job one-handed, I read.
J. K. RowlingI read a ton of paper every day. I read the newspapers, I read my intelligence materials, I read all the briefing materials. I read the newspaper in hard copy.
Susan RiceRead, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
William FaulknerI would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.
Khaled HosseiniThere are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive.
Henry Ward BeecherI think the right to read, is one of our inherent rights, and I think that people in America today are intelligent enough to decide for themselves what they want to read. Without being told, by self-appointed people, you must not read this, or you cannot read this.
Bennett CerfI've never read a book on shape. I've read books on gesture; I've read tons of books on color, surface, field, ground, representation, abstraction. But I've never read a book on what a shape is.
Amy SillmanRead. You don't have to read me. But just read. Read the best people. Everybody's trying to do the same thing, which is keep you turning pages. Everyone does it a different way. But we all want you to understand [our books].
Mike LupicaCertain readers will read my book not because they are interested in Iraq, but because they read crime fiction. I did want to get beyond just speaking to other Middle East scholars, so I'm happy about that. But this was, nonetheless, a novel I wish I got to read in Arabic and translate.
Elliott CollaI love to read, and so I've been reading everything I can, not intensely, but I love to read so I read "Origin of Species" by Darwin and I can't make head or tail of E=MC squared by Einstein, but I try to baffle my way through that.
Anthony HopkinsI may be the person who put "dieselpunk" into the conversation. I have always been a reader who reads in a really broad way. I read genre writers and I read literary fiction and I read books by dead people.
Emily BartonDo three things each night before you go to bed: read a poem, read a short story, read an essay.
Ray BradburyOne can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
Arthur SchopenhauerIt is always sort of unnerving to hear from people who've read my books. I'm not reading any of the reviews and most of my friends haven't read it - they bought it, which is all I frankly care about, but they haven't read it.
Hanya YanagiharaShe read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didnโt taste bad, but she was still unhappy.
Cornelia FunkeThe Bible, when not read in schools, is seldom read in any subsequent period of life...The Bible...should be read in our schools in preference to all other books because it contains the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public happiness.
Benjamin RushGrades were important in our house. I was reading by two. My mom would sit there and read with me, read with me, read with me. It was wonderful.
Fergie[I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.
G. H. HardySometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.
Peter KropotkinI do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays.
Charlie KaufmanRead the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.
Edward AlbeeBut one type of book that practically no one likes to read is a book about the law. Books about the law are notorious for being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read. This is one reason many lawyers make heaps of money. The money is an incentive - the word "incentive" here means "an offered reward to persuade you to do something you don't want to do - to read long, dull, and difficult books.
Daniel HandlerI read everywhere. It's like a bodily function. I don't need quiet. I write and read with the TV on. I follow the TV show while I read. TV doesn't require a lot of brainpower.
Chris AbaniI never send a story off until I have read it aloud to at least two or three people. Because when I read - and I don't need their criticism, what I need is my own - when I read it aloud, there is a flow, there is a poetry to it.
Harlan EllisonArabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.
Elliott CollaYou can't just skip the boring parts." "Of course I can skip the boring parts." "How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?" "I can tell." "Then you can't say you've read the whole play." "I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." "Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.
Gary D. SchmidtDune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It's something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you're going to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should, then you have to read Dune, too.
Kevin J. AndersonSure, kids want to read whatever is the hot book, and of course they want to read fantasy and any kind of speculative fiction, but they also like to read stories with kids that look just like them, that have the same problems as them. And I've noticed that what they particularly want to see is to see those characters prevail. So they don't want sanitized situations. They want stories to be raw, they want them to be gritty, but they also do want to see the hope at the end of the story.
Sofia QuinteroWhatever our bedtime was as kids, we could stay up an extra half hour if we were reading. My parents didn't care as long as I was under the spell of a Stephen King or a Douglas Adams. Now I read in bed. I read at work. I read standing in line. It's like, 'Hello, my name is Nathan and I am a reader.'
Nathan FillionI never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom.
Story MusgraveAbout Thomas Hobbes: He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and "twas the 47 El. libri I" [Pythagoras' Theorem]. He read the proposition "By God", sayd he, "this is impossible:" So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry.
John AubreyWhen I came out, and for many years afterwards, it had become a habit for me to sit and read and read and read, like an obsession. I would take 20 books, and not come out until I'd finished them. It took me a while to change that habit.
Mohsen MakhmalbafI made a point to not read too far ahead with the first six or seven episodes of any show. I would read the outlines, but I didn't really want to read scripts too far in advance because I didn't really want to get ahead of myself, at all. To be honest, I don't have the time to come up with theories.
Simon BakerAnthropologists visit the temple sites and read the inscriptions and make up stories about the Maya, but they do not read the signs correctly. Its just their imagination. Other people write about prophecy in the name of the Maya. They say that the world will end in December 2012. The Mayan elders are angry with this. The world will not end. It will be transformed.
Carlos BarriosThe books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. โฆ they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.
Thomas MannI wanted to be a writer that had an impact. I wanted, and still I say the same thing, I want to write books that change people's lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I wanna write books that are read in 50 or 100 years.
James FreyI never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.
Robertson DaviesIt's not important - it's not necessary that you read everything. What is necessary is that you care about things that you read and that you find something that really matters to you and you try and make something like that.
Edward HirschReading our Bible is actually fundamental, but there is more if we are going to walk in His truth. Even if we read the Bible, if we do not read it by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, we will not understand it correctly.
Rick JoynerSo much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.
Donna LeonThe more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
Annie DillardI would not want to forget the first time I read The Lord of the Rings. I would never want to forget that! That was so magical to me, and that was a real eye-opening experience. I was probably 11 when I read that and already a reader, but I think that book really showed me how you can be transported and how your imagination can take you to a whole other place.
Sharon CameronYou can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone.
A.L. Kennedy... the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read; but it doesn't happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I am truly beside myself.
Nora Ephron