I think the most important lesson isn't necessarily to try and write a different book every time, or to try and brand yourself and write one specific kind of book, but to write the kind of books you love to read.
When you live with Dickens for years, reading him and trying to present him as faithfully as you can, you can't fail to love the man - so the shock of his bad behaviour is considerable, even when you know it is coming.
I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?
I've always been curious. I keep a list of people I'd love to have lunch with, like the Pope or Leonard Cohen. I'll read an article about someone I've never met and think, 'I should ask him to lunch!'
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
I read the 'Harry Potter' books as I was writing my own books, and I love them, but I don't think Harry was very much like I was as a kid. He's always brave, and he's perfect in a lot of ways.
I like to read. I go to movies quite a bit. I often go to see friends in theater productions. I hike, stretch and work out. I like to sing. I love going back to acting class and working on new material.
One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augus...
Idleness does drive me crazy, but I'd rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it.
'Pastoralia' by George Saunders. Possibly my favorite book. It's one of the weirdest books I've ever read. If Monty Python and Thomas Pynchon had a love child, and it was raised by Frank Zappa on a weird commune, that would be this book.
The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes lite...
If you can read this, then you have enough to be thankful for, because if you are still alive, you surely have a shot at making your dreams come true.
I never understood why anyone would do magazines. Like, why would someone put their face out there so much? It's because those people reading magazines will go see the movie, so you do it.
Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.
I don't think of myself as a fast reader. I just read a lot. When someone else might think, 'I might do the dishes,' I don't. But then the dishes multiply.
I try to read all news sources - not just CNN or FOX, but worldwide papers and journals, to get opinions from every end of the spectrum - and then I like to try to find out the cut and dried facts - and go from there.
The people who have the strongest opinion about everything have never left their city, their town, haven't left their 'hood, haven't left their area, their corner of the world. They don't read. They've never left their house.
I've got to say, my parents have always been very supportive. I used to sit in my bedroom and read every liner note and listened to records. My parents are rock fans.
As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.
Reading the text of my blog itself is not really the interesting part. The exciting part is how the Internet allows me to be the eyes and ears for the people sending me postings from Africa.
We Americans are mildly interested, of course, in reading about the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, but what we really yearn to know is the name of the uncommemorated French female who first mixed a sauce bearnaise.
