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Read, read, read, read, read. Read everything. You canโt work unless you know the world, and outside of living in the world the best way to learn about the world is to read about it.
John GoodmanEverybody should read fictionโฆ I donโt think serious fiction is written for a few people. I think we live in a stupid culture that wonโt educate its people to read these things. It would be a much more interesting place if it would. And itโs not just that mechanics and plumbers donโt read literary fiction, itโs that doctors and lawyers donโt read literary fiction. It has nothing to do with class, it has to do with an anti-intellectual culture that doesnโt trust art.
Percival EverettTake a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.
Soren KierkegaardAnd readโฆ read all the timeโฆ read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.
David McCulloughIf youโre a serious minded leader, you will read. You will read all you can. You will read when you feel like it, and you will read when you donโt. You will do whatever you have to do to increase your leadership input, because you know as well as I do that it will make you better.
Bill HybelsHow about Proust's In Search of Lost Time?" Tamaru asked. "If you've never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing." "Have you read it?" "No, I haven't been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust.
Haruki MurakamiRead! Read! Read! And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.
W. P. KinsellaI'm a spiritual person, I believe that if you read the bible, you get what you want from it. But, when you actually read it, you see the beauty, spirituality, the joy and love and what makes us godly. And then if you read between the lines of all the same books, you always see the human influence in the writing... it's not all about religiousness, it's about spirituality.
Carlos MenciaOne can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.
Nathalie SarrauteA lot of actors choose parts by the scripts, but I don't trust reading the scripts that much. I try to get some friends together and read a script aloud. Sometimes I read scripts and record them and play them back to see if there's a movie. It's very evocative; it's like a first cut because you hear 'She walked to the door,' and you visualize all these things. 'She opens the door' . . . because you read the stage directions, too.
Al PacinoRead for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways.
Katherine PatersonStudents who read the most also read the best, achieve the most, and stay in school the longest. Conversely, those who dont read much cannot get better at it.
Jim TreleaseA conventional good read is usually a bad read, a relaxing bath in what we know already. A true good read is surely an act of innovative creation in which we, the readers, become conspirators.
Augustine BirrellWhen you start out as an actor, you read a script thinking of it at its best. But that's not usually the case in general, and usually what you have to do is you have to read a script and think of it at its worst. You read it going, "OK, how bad could this be?" first and foremost. You cannot make a good film out of a bad script. You can make a bad film out of a good script, but you can't make a good film out of a bad script.
George ClooneyI think any comic book - or really, any book that you can read - in a sense is an educational tool in that it helps literacy. The more you read, the better you get at it. It almost doesn't matter what you read, the important thing is for young people to become readers.
Stan LeeReading is the creative center of a writerโs life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for booksโ of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyoneโs favorite, the john. You can even read while youโre driving, thanks to the audiobook revolution. Of the books I read each year, anywhere from six to a dozen are on tape.
Stephen KingI 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 KaufmanIf learning to read was as easy as learning to talk, as some writers claim, many more children would learn to read on their own. The fact that they do not, despite their being surrounded by print, suggests that learning to read is not a spontaneous or simple skill.
David ElkindA boy is a long time before he knows his alphabet, longer before he has learned to spell, and perhaps several years before he can read distinctly; and yet there are some people who, as soon as they get on a horse, entirely undressed and untaught, fancy that by beating and spurring they will make him a dressed horse in one morning only. I would fain ask such stupid people whether by beating a boy they would teach him to read without first showing him the alphabet? Sure, they would beat him to death, before they would make him read.
Monty RobertsTo admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
Virginia WoolfI hated to read. My mother could not get me to read. Iโm going through the same thing with my daughter now. I love to read now, but I donโt remember reading.
Dorothy HamillI don't always want to read serious fiction. But when I read fiction that's not serious, I don't want to read brain candy. Entertain me, for God's sake.
Dorothea Benton FrankDune 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. AndersonWhat I do usually is read the book first, for pleasure, to see if my brain starts connecting with it, as a movie. And then, if I say yes, I read it again, only this time I take a pen and, inside the book, I say, "Okay, this is a scene. I don't need this. I'm going to try this. I'm not going to take this." And then, I use that book like a bible and each chapter heading, I write a menu of what's in that chapter, in case I ever need to reference it. And then, I start to outline and write it. I get in there and it starts to evolve, based on having re-read it again.
Richard LaGraveneseI don't care about people kissing my ass or telling me how great I am. I don't really give a damn. I read the bad stuff a whole lot more than I read the good stuff. I read that because there are always going to be critics who are going to say how good you aren't.
Richard ShermanI do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.
Daniel TammetNo one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
Cynthia OzickI looked, for example, to certain types of literature to which I would like to refer, like The Peregrine by J. A. Baker, and I mention a book, "read this, read it, read it if you are serious of being in any type of art or into filmmaking," or films that I should quote as examples.
Werner HerzogThe book on my nightstand right now isnt anything that inspired me, but it entertained me. I read a book on Labor Day, it was a holiday, and I have three daughters, and we all went to the shopping mall and I sat on the bench and read a book while they shopped, it was called The Greatest Golfer there Ever Was, it was a great book, easy to read and entertaining.
Max LucadoI started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on...By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. I had read every book in two libraries and had a card for the Forty-Second Street branch.
James A. BaldwinIf we are always reading aloud something that is more difficult than children can read themselves then when they come to that book later, or books like that, they will be able to read them - which is why even a fifth grade teacher, even a tenth grade teacher, should still be reading to children aloud. There is always something that is too intractable for kids to read on their own.
Mem FoxIn fighting a bull you're always aware of a paradox concerning your perceptions of the bull. On the one hand it's your perceptions of the bull that give you the upper hand. You read the bull, you learn to read the bull more and more accurately, and this reading of the bull is how you deploy your intelligence against the bull's intelligence. Your accuracy in reading the bull is a weapon, maybe your most important weapon, against all the bull's weapons. On the other hand, you're human, you have the human tendency to read into the bull things which may not actually be there.
Bette FordIt's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.
Alice MunroIf you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.
Anna BrackettThe challenge was the opportunity. When I read the first draft of Steve Kloves' fabulous adaptation - I hadn't read [Michael] Chabon's book at that time - what I was immediately captivated by was this group of characters that were at once so engaging and so messed up.
Curtis HansonTo read the report of a discussion in which arguments for and against are presented, in which a subject has been covered from different points of view, with new ideas advanced - this is far more instructive than to read a brief account of the resolution passed on the matter.
Fredrik BajerI don't like to read books where I feel as though I've stepped into the middle of things and don't know what's going on. I like to see characters I've met before, but I don't want to feel left out because I haven't read other books in the series.
Jude DeverauxWalt had a seat-of-the-pants approach on what he wanted musically. We kind of 'read' the boss and had a very high batting average, but there were occasions when he felt we had just written the wrong piece for the situation he wanted. We invariably listened to what he wanted - he was very descriptive in what he wanted and we could read him. We'd go back to the drawing board and work out what he wanted. He was a great inspiration, but a tough taskmaster.
Richard ShermanI can't write or read music. I am self-taught and never learned formally. It can be a curse sometimes but I think it's more difficult for those who need the music to read from than for those who play by ear.
Einar SelvikThe more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
Annie DillardHassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.
Khaled HosseiniThe ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.
Anthony BurgessIsn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.
Cornelia FunkeI thought of all the magazine article I'd read on mothers who worked and constantly felt guilty about leaving their children with someone else. I had trained myself to read pieces like that and silently say to myself, 'See how lucky you are?' But it had been gnawing at the inside, that part that didn't fit, that I never let myself even think about. After all, wasn't it a worse kind of guilt to be with your child and to know that you wanted to be anywhere but there?
Jodi Picoult