How can you be so nice to me and how can you forgive me when I’ve been such a jerk?” Maddy appears to think for a moment. “When you are reading a book and you finish a chapter, you don’t keep re-reading the chapter you just finished. You move...
I finally gave in today. Admitting that I haven't been able to do it alone, that's defeat right? But do a couple pills change why I'm here? Will my spirit be altered? Do my passions change? Will I lose hope either way? My madness is what makes me. It...
Let me love you, he said I want to mould that broken heart, To feel the pain the others before I have caused, Walk down the darkness that you walked through, Understand how something so broken can be so beautiful, I need to understand how you manifes...
I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.
What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power ...
The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and ...
Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, a...
To be the best, you have to be willing to do what nobody does. And today, if nobody reads and nobody works hard, then you also have to give up reading and become lethargic to be successful.
Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a...
The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak househol...
We should always aim to read something different=not only the writers with whom we agree, but those with whom we are ready to do battle. Their point of view challenges us to examine the truth and to test their views...and let us not comment on nor cr...
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be ve...
I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made th...
Reading all the quotes in the world won’t make you or me into Plato, Gandhi Or Einstein, just like watching hundreds games of soccer won’t make you a soccer player or taking a yoga class will make u a yogini, or reading a golf book will make you ...
I hate to be a nag, but you have to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers' circles and at summer schools, and I'm continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarc...
Fans are always asking me where I get my ideas from. The answer is that I'm very curious, and I get inspiration from everywhere. I read the newspapers voraciously, so I know what's going on in real crime. I pay attention to the strange stories people...
Aw, fudge,' floated down to me, as a couple of golden eyes peered over a third-floor window ledge. 'You're a freaking dhampir. Why are you reading Tolkien?' I shrugged, then had to dodge the potted geranium he threw at me. 'After five hundred years, ...
In my writing class, we never, ever talk about the writing - ever. We never address a story that's been read. I also won't let anyone look at the person who's reading. No eye contact; everybody has to draw a spiral. And I would like to do a drawing c...
If you take a book into your hands, be it 'God's book, or any other useful good book,' rely on God to make it profitable to you. Do not waste time reading unprofitable books. When you read, do so not out of vain curiosity but with love for God's king...
Of John Le Carre's books, I've only read 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,' and I haven't read anything by Graham Greene, but I've heard a great deal about how 'Your Republic Is Calling You' reminded English readers of those two writers. I don't re...
They say that to escape reality is when you sleep, but when you sleep your sub conscious is in control of your dreams. For me to escape reality is when I read and write. When I read the world around me doesn't exist. The world in the story does and w...
