As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.
People read vampire novels and say, 'Oh I want to read another vampire novel.' People read fantasy, and they're like, 'Oh I love fantasy.' I don't know that people are necessarily finishing 'Hunger Games' and immediately wanting to read another dystopian tale.
You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.
Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I'm reviewing the book, I have to write the review before I start reading any other book. I especially hate it when the phone rings and interrupts my train of thought.
I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends.
What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.
The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.
When I came to the last line of 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story's language.
We read of the courageous march south to battle the Confederate Army by the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Unlike their white counterparts, they understood from the beginning that they would be offered no quarter if captured alive.
I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.
When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they're standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.
If you've read 'Dark Ecology,' you'll know there's a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.
I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the president, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that's not the kind of fiction that I like to read.
We've all read, I'm sure, a Superman book where we didn't really feel like we knew the character. Where the writer, often with the best of intentions, has tried put a personal stamp on the character, whether it be to try and make him more current, or cool, or have a broader appeal, etc.
I try to tell one lie in every interview. It keeps people I know amused when they read the article.
A novel is too much of a commitment. I tend to peruse Twitter - I check to see if I had any mentions and read the latest messages.
I was a bit odd. I read books and wanted to draw and go to art school.
So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.
My grandmother was this amazing woman in the Dominican Republic who used to read tea leaves and palms. She would cure people in her neighborhood by going into her garden, plucking a couple of leaves, and brewing teas.
I read about this hotel that was great, down in the south of the island, not in a touristy area. I had no particular desire ever to go to Jamaica, but I thought, what the hell? Sounds nice. Let's go!
The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.
I read a lot of biographies and books with an African background.
For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.
You'll go mad trying to figure out what people want. I don't bother. I write the stories I want to read.
I read the final Wallander novel, 'The Troubled Man,' not long after it was published.
I think it's a bit of a myth that if you can read music you can write music. It doesn't work like that.
I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.
You know, I don't read the blogs, or go on the internet, and I really just don't know what people are saying because... well I guess I'm afraid to.
When you read 'author Katharine Holabird, creator of Angelina' and you're not even mentioned, you wince.
Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.
Personally, I don't even read bummer news stories about the environment because it makes me feel helpless to fix anything and reminds me that the general population doesn't treat these issues as an important part of our political life.
When I was in school I read a lot of comic books and pretend I was in them and kids would tease me and call me names. But now I do the same things and people say that I'm artistic and cool and I'm doing the exact same thing I did in high school.
When I feel off, I read the 'Tao Te Ching' to get my equilibrium right. I started reading it in the eleventh grade.
Our daughter's name Arwynn comes from Arwen in 'Lord of the Rings' because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another.
