grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.
My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.
But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.
My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.
Whenever I'm reading a book I enjoy, I always develop a mental list of the people I want to share it with.
I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.
I've deliberately studied many things that I know, going in, I won't be able to assimilate. I read Plato, St. Thomas, the mystics, to exercise my mind.
People could see by your actions on the park that you cared about it. If we got beat, I'd fling the Sunday papers in the bin and wouldn't read them.
I've always read books and loved human behavior since I was ten or twelve years old. Maybe even that's why I wanted to do comedy.
I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests' books.
Farewell all relations and friends in Christ; farewell acquaintances and all earthly enjoyments; farewell reading and preaching, praying and believing, wanderings, reproaches, and sufferings.
The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.
We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.
The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.
I read the script and try not to bring anything personal into it. I make notes, talk to the director and we decide what kinds of shades should be in the character.
'The Long Goodbye' is one book I like to read over and over again, and it was an enormous inspiration for 'All The Wrong Questions'.
I think books that are meant to be read in the nighttime ought to confront the very fears that we're trying to think about.
The statistics might have a Eurosceptic cast, but they are not exactly a fun read. Few of us want to wade through ONS graphs or European Commission tables.
Films are wonderful but they do fix an identity. I can't read 'Pride and Prejudice' anymore, for instance, without imaging Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.
I know a lot of people in the retirement village that I have a house in in Florida that are on the Internet and are reading the paper on the Internet, and they're communicating on the Internet.
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
