I daily disconnect and read a good book or listen to a good sermon or call a friend or my mom and talk on the phone with my feet up. I also take baths with bath salts that I make myself.
Sometimes I have given my husband a manuscript to read that has turned out to have fantastic rave reviews and he'll tell me it is no good. Well, if I didn't know him as well as I know him I would be terribly depressed.
Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.
I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.
A good interviewer is able to ferret out what the applicant is really passionate about. Ask them what they do for fun, what they're reading, try and find out if they have a life outside of work.
Honor is a gift a man gives himself. You can be as good as anyone that ever lived. If you can read, you can learn everything that anyone ever learned. But you've got to want it.
All the reading in the world cannot immunize you from the devastating effects of psychopaths. Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, conned, and left bewildered by them. A good psychopath can play a concerto on anyone's heart strings.
Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
I'm not really a director for hire. You read these scripts and go, 'This is a really great script, but Paul Greengrass would make this so much better than me.' I usually say, 'I know who would be good for this. It's not me.'
I remember, when I was writing 'Traffic,' talking to top federal drug-enforcement officials and having them say they read it and found it very good and believable, except the scene where the girl describes her resume.
I'm not sure I would be a good godmother. I have read about it, and I found that the godmother's position is to take care of the morals of the child. I don't know how good I would be at that.
It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics...
But you can still find good films if you read your local film critics and are willing to drive a bit. You have to be a proactive film viewer to have the most provocative cinema life.
'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.
I was dyslexic - was, still am - 'cause I would see words that weren't there. And people just started laughing, and I thought, well, this is a good way to make a living. I'll just go downtown to read and have people laugh, you know?
People know that I am a very good author. But they would rather read what I have to say about the next election.
I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly goo...
And all of Laura's stuff, what they wrote originally wasn't as good and Constance wound up doing that herself. That was all her stuff, reading to the child, because she had children herself and that's what she would have done.
I read, go for walks and I love to garden. My hands are such a mess. People think I should have movie star hands, but they're just gardening ones. Always slightly grubby and with a bit of dirt under the fingernails.
I think Syria is often covered by phone. You have to talk to activists. You have to try to read the tea leaves. You have to talk to government officials. It's remote-control reporting in a way.
I never thought I'd see the day when the U.S. government could listen in on phone conversations or read private mail without first obtaining a warrant from a court. That sounds more like something that happened in the Soviet Union.
