When I was sent the script for 'Homeland,' I didn't think anything of it. Three months later, my manager rang and said: 'They are interested in you.' I read it and I realised, 'Yes, I do want this.' Then I got an email saying I'd got it.
A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show - in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever - is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a wor...
Many people find their calling very early in their lives. These are the kind of people we read about in school books and newspapers. Then there are some who don't have a clue of what they want to do in their lives; I am belong to the latter category.
History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they w...
What everybody misses here is that we are doing the same thing my father did. He licensed and litigated and protected his property, and we have to follow the same tradition, because the way the law reads, if you don't protect it, you lose it.
Remember that just because major publishing is having trouble, that doesn't mean people have stopped reading books. Printed books won't go away, but ebooks won't go away, either.
I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'
I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, 'This is my idea and here's all the reasons that it's right.' It doesn't make for very compelling reading.
You could probably live without mastering the ability. But the ability to read those books…it’ll introduce you to new worlds and new thoughts. You can learn a lot about a man from the books he treasures.
Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but the...
I am hopelessly devoted to paper. Nothing against e-readers of any sort - anything that keeps people reading is okay by me - but I am not, historically, an early adopter of such things.
I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, if I have to do a reading, preparing.
The first episodes I actually read for 'Downton,' Sybil was really intimidated and hadn't come into her own. So it's only in Series Two that she's become so headstrong. In general, I find it exciting to play strong, female roles because they're shock...
Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.
I notice when I'm on these trips, I read like mad. It's the only thing that seems to center me, bring me back to remembering who I am. Or forgetting who I am!
Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words.
A whole army, though they can neither write nor read, are not afraid of a platform, which they know is but earth or stone; nor of a cannon, which, without a hand to give fire to it, is but cold iron; therefore a whole army is afraid of one man.
I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.
I get readings, I sometimes get five a week. You'll feel like a schizophrenic by the end of that week. I don't know who I am any more. You'll be in conversation with a friend and start spitting out dialogue.
I'll turn on the TV or look at a magazine, and it's like, 'Who is this person?' And you find out they are from '16 and Pregnant,' and I'm like, 'Really? They're celebrities now?' You read about them on the news having fights and breakups, and I think...
I never really read a character before that I connected with more than Peeta. So, for me, if I couldn't get that job I was like, 'Well, if I can't play practically myself in a movie, what can I play?'
