Reading Quotes - page 90

The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called significant literature will only be sold . . . by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles. (Raymond Chandler)
One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing. View quote
George R. R. Martin
At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism. View quote
Iggy Pop
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read. View quote
Samuel Johnson
Children start off reading in books about lions and giraffes and so on, but they also-if they're lucky enough and have reasonable privileges of any human being-are able to go into a garden and turn over stone and see a worm and see a slug and see an ant. View quote
David Attenborough
Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading. View quote
Margaret Atwood
If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again. View quote
Margaret Atwood
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book. View quote
Margaret Atwood
Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits. View quote
Margaret Atwood
I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing. (Margaret Atwood)
I know that all this is dull reading, tiresome, perhaps tedious, but it is all necessary. View quote
Miguel de Unamuno
To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really. View quote
Philip Roth
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. View quote
Antonin Artaud
All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content. View quote
Henry Miller
In Soviet times the border was closed so we couldn't get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn't have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff. View quote
Wladimir Klitschko
Always fatuity, vulgarity, as soon as human passion is touched. [...] Just as some poetry is of the eye (form, colour) and some of the ear, so Keats is of the palate. Not only has he constant reference to its pleasures, but the general sensation after reading him is one of tasting. 'What's the harm? View quote
E. M. Forster
I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom,' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it. View quote
Nick Clegg
Real understanding of a thing comes from taking it apart oneself, not reading about it in a book or hearing about it in a classroom. View quote
Robert B. Laughlin
I've always enjoyed reading lyrics, trying to do them more than just lyrics, trying to have some more meaning in them. I know a lot of people are just happy to have a kind of broken word lyrics. I just wonder why, there's no reason why they can't at least attempt to do something a bit better. View quote
Bruce Dickinson
I've been to the Reading festival twice before-as a punter, though I stayed backstage in the hospitality tent. (Bruce Dickinson)
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction! View quote
Philip Pullman
Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. View quote
Ian McEwan
She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else? View quote
Ian McEwan
PALMISTRY, n. The 947th method ... of obtaining money by false pretences by 'reading character' in the wrinkles of the hand. The pretence is not altogether false... for the wrinkles in every hand submitted plainly spell the word 'dupe.' View quote
Ambrose Bierce