If you don't think you want to go on a train and read the paper every day and work from nine to six at night, there was something about the uncertainty when I was younger which was very attractive.
There's really not much that people can pick on me for my work, so obviously they find other reasons to write something bad about me. I mean, people enjoy reading bad stuff about people.
I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.
I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians could read my work and draw some conclusions from it.
I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.
I admired the work ethic of the cowboys I read about. The idea of these young people taking on this much responsibility was impressive. I would like modern readers to have an appreciation of this.
Many women have told me they remember where they were when they read the book, and how they felt suddenly that what they really thought or felt about things made sense.
I was reading through endless junk scripts that were being sent my way. Typically the roles were to play his wife or his girlfriend - leading roles for women were few and far between.
I grew up with 'Jane Eyre,' reading it at school, and it's one of those, I think, for a lot of women, a lot of girls, it's the iconic story and so many girls relate to Jane Eyre and her character.
I was born into Sudan's civil war, and before I could read or write, I was using an AK47 in the conflict between the Muslim north and Animist/Christian south over the land and natural resources.
No American can read the story of the part America took in the war without experiencing a glow of patriotic feeling. Every Allied nation can say the same thing.
After the war, I went to the BBC monitoring service in Caversham, a suburb of Reading. It was a big aerial system to listen to radio programmes all over the world.
He read his mind. He's a strange sort of man, isn't he? It's not just the advice and the wisdom that he has.
Reading Virginia Woolf will change your life, may even save it. If you want to make sense of modern life, the works of Virginia Woolf remain essential reading. More than fifty years since her death, accounts of her life still set the pace for modern ...
They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they kno...
It’s like Mark Twain once said to his wife, Olivia: “How many times do I have to say it—over the top!” He wasn’t talking about women being overly dramatic. He was in fact referring to the proper placement of toilet paper. And I agree to a c...
I started thinking more about music. I thought I'd accepted the fact that, as part of "Being Gretchen," I didn't really like music, but in fact, the truth was slightly different: I thought I didn't like music, but in fact, I didn't approve of my own ...
Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, m...
I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what's going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature,...
So I kept reading, just to stay alive. In fact, I'd read two or three books at the same time, so I wouldn't finish one without being in the middle of another -- anything to stop me from falling into the big, gaping void. You see, books fill the empty...
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against...