If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.
I have read of the great wars of ages past, and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to their deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts.
Jack reads too many books. He thinks we're going to drive all year and have great adventures.
I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.
I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.
I know as a child, I was really interested in becoming a manga artist, to create my own stories and illustrate them and present something that people would be interested in reading and looking at as well.
It's wonderful to feel supported, but there's a lot of negative energy towards me as well. So I ignore it, to be honest. If I started to read it all it would completely mess up my head.
I just know I'm too much of a wuss for Stephen King's books. I'm way too chicken to read horror.
I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.
If you're from a certain generation, you basically learn to read with 'Peanuts.' It's sort of the template for the modern strip. Its influence ceased to be noticed because it's in everything.
I started reading and talking and interviewing nutritionists and a thread was starting to form for me which is - a protein digests in a different rate of speed than a carbohydrate.
Most of the auditions I went on, I passed up the projects because I just wasn't interested. When I read A Knight's Tale, that was that. I knew I wanted to do this movie.
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.
'Star Wars' is something that I've been a fan of since I was a kid - I played all the video games and I grew up reading 'Star Wars' books.
Children are trained to think linearly instead of imaginatively; they are taught to read slowly and carefully, and are discouraged from daydreaming. They are trained to reduce the use and capacity of their brain.
I contend that it's impossible to read the Sermon on the Mount and not come out against capital punishment.
Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.
I tell you, the difference for me is between being victimized, terrorized, numbed by reading about different disasters, or reducing the anxiety by getting up and doing something about it, at whatever level.
