I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.
I would like to know that when I read the paper in the morning, it's telling me something that actually happened, and I think the vast majority of journalists want the same thing.
I drink a bucket of white tea in the morning. I read about this tea of the Emperor of China, which is supposedly the tea of eternal youth. It's called Silver Needle. It's unbelievably expensive, but I get it on the Web.
I'd always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.
Every morning when I pick up the newspaper and read about an earthquake in Japan or problems in European financial institutions, the first question I ask our staff is 'What is money-market-fund exposure?'
Sometimes I lose a whole morning waiting on journalists and other people who look for me. But I always find some time for reading, talking to my friends and feeling what is happening in this world.
If men were but to read the New Testament with the same tone and emphasis, with which they do other books, and were to keep out of mind the idea of its being sacred, they would be disgusted with the credulity, and the want of intellect, reason and ju...
I felt like I had never really heard of a story that reflected the stuff I was going through as a mom. I came up with an idea for a story about motherhood that I would want to read.
I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.
The comics I read as a kid were much more influenced by TV and movies. Encountering superheroes as an adult without that kind of childhood sentimentality, it just doesn't allow you, or in my case at least, it wouldn't let me take the characters serio...
I don't cry at books or movies. Ever. So imagine my shock and awe when I read 'The Time Traveler's Wife' for the second time, and I knew the ending, and I started to cry.
I think if you study people in the street today, you do sometimes feel that they have taken their behavior and their language from things that they have seen rather than read - from soap operas and movies and so on.
Vance: [reading a card that Tom has written] Roses are red, violets are blue... Fuck you, whore!
Addison DeWitt: While you wait you can read my column. It'll make minutes fly like hours.
[about her article about the war] Solomon Vandy: So when people in your country read it, they will come help, yes? Maddy Bowen: Probably not.
[about Gretel's reading from their tutor of popaganda about "the Jew"] Bruno: I don't understand. One man caused all this trouble?
Deckard: You're reading a magazine. You come across a full-page nude photo of a girl. Rachael: Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?
Deckard: [narrating] The report read "Routine retirement of a replicant." That didn't make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back.
Reverend Johnson: We will now read from Matthew, Mark, Luke... [stick of dynamite sails in through window] Reverend Johnson: ... and DUCK.
I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that.
I really would have been stupid not to have done it. It was also a film that was actually happening, I mean, Miramax was doing it, and it had a kind of legitimacy to it. And once I read the script, I was there.
