I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down the first.
One day at my grandmother's house, I discovered 'The Secret Garden' and read it. This was the first book I found entirely for myself, and I cherished it.
It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.
Even though writing articles relies completely on truth, you still must tell an interesting story. You can't worry about people knowing who you are and whether or not they want to read your stories.
Accents are very tangible, blessedly, and if you have to do one, it's a way of getting into character. I can read it through a few times and pretend I know what I'm doing!
We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challen...
A visit to Israel is always an experience in cognitive dissonance. The Israel you personally see and hear is so completely different from the Israel you read and hear about in the media.
I'm around my kids every day. I'm regular. We're a regular family. My wife cooks, she washes clothes, I read books, I pump my own gas, I get my own hair cut.
Just as movies, radio, and television evolved into new forms over time, the ebook will also become something more than just a way to read books. It will become its own specific and unique way of creating and sharing experience.
No characters in 'Stay Close,' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting reading experience, something that will stay with you a little bit longer.
That difficult start drove me on to inspire children and let them know that it is never to late to repair a bad experience at school, and once you get your head down and start to read books, you can really achieve.
I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about ...
As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don't adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.
Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.
Schools and parents can team up to find books that kids will really get excited about - that will make them say, 'That was a great experience. Now I know why people get excited about reading.'
Sometimes you read a script, and you just think, 'Wow, I would love to go and tell that story, and I don't even care what happens to the film, I would just love that experience.' And often, that mentality makes a great film.
After reading Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad when I was a student at Yale, I wanted to live in the world they captured in their books. I had had some experience living in Africa. I was drawn to that kind of adventure.
'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.
When I wake up, I'm like, 'I gotta go to Whole Foods.' I'm constantly reading cookbooks; I bring hardcover cookbooks with me on the plane and tag pages. I just have this crazy food obsession.
My perfect day is constantly changing. Right now, it would be to lie around in a hammock reading with a portable phone and a table of food next to it. I would spend all day there. And that's all that I can possibly come up with on the spur of the mom...
Never, ever exercise in front of a TV or while reading. You lose 50 percent of the benefit of the exercise by not hearing and feeling your heart rate, your sweat and the pain levels that need to be encountered in fitness training.
