People who think that love, sex, marriage, work, play, life and death are serious matters are urged NOT to read this book. Buy it, yes, but don't read it. [Regarding "The Fool's Progress"]
It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.
Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.
I sped-read through a book that probably weighed a pound, though I only gleaned about nine ounces of information. That's because it was a book on love that I read while making love. I multitask like I pay by the hour.
I must confess to generally hating sections entitled “how to read this book” and so on. I feel that, if I bought it, I should be able to read it any way I damn well please! Nevertheless, I feel some guidelines may be useful.
It's easy to make women happier and busier. How? Buy her a talking mirror beside bitching it has to be programmed to say, "You are looking very beautiful and slimmer," at precisely every hour.
My lifesaver has always been the hazel iris of your soul. It never fails. When the world plunges me deep into the darkness, one look from you is all it takes to save me.
I have always considered myself a person with a gypsy heart, and I Surrender my dreams to my soul, for it's a free sprit who believes in no boundaries of region and religion.
Truthfully, there're only a handful of people in this world who really get joy from seeing you happy. Most won't care if you’re happy, only if you're miserable like they are. They eat that shit up.
You're gone and you left me. My heart has dissipated. The only thing I can feel is the blood rushing through my veins and the strings that hold my fragile heart together.
When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.
There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.
When I can’t write I read. When I can’t read I sleep. And when I can’t sleep I write.
When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves.
If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.
Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the b...
Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the...
I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done ...
I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
If I don't like someone and I start reading their stuff, it seems like my brain will just automatically start criticizing everything that's there. It's really hard to read a book without having all this outside information telling you what to think a...
