People write fiction in their minds all the time - every time we read a 'human interest' news story, or a true crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we're trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become.
I tried, after I wrote 'Twilight,' to read 'The Historian,' because it was the big thing that summer. But I can't read other people's vampires. If it's too close, I get upset; if it's too far away, I get upset. It just makes me very neurotic.
Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.
School was always a major player in my personal journey. It allowed me to open up to the world, and also social mobility. It allowed me to enrich myself, to read, learn and understand.
I like to be read. That's most of what any writer could want.
I was in my senior year of high school when I read 'Notes From Underground' by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn't known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way.
We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'
My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.
I think meeting someone like, meeting Sam Shepard, that was someone who was kind of important for me, because I'd read so much of his work and watched him as an actor since I was a kid, then being on set doing a scene with him and thinking, 'This is really surreal.'
Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.
Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.
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.
In 'Where the Air is Clear', Carlos Fuentes composed a polyphonic portrait of Mexico City amid the growth and modernization brought on by the economic boom of the 1950s. The novel can be read as a jazz interpretation - free and in a Mexican key - of John Dos Passos' 'Manhattan Transfer'.
Anyone who has read my books will know that I don't tend to use guides when I am travelling. It's not a pride thing, but it is certainly a fact.
I like to read in the bathtub. Ideally, that bathtub would be located on a small Greek island.
Just because you're from a city ten miles outside of St. Paul. It doesn't mean you don't read magazines, or the incredible Internet, and what's going on in the world. I never, ever take a client, or women, for granted.
I was not a giant comic book fan as a kid, but to the extent that I did read comics, Spider-Man was always my favorite guy.
I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.
People read legal writing differently. When you're at the crux of a legal argument, every step is a step in the argument. The judge will see any holes. If you do that in fiction, it's too long and boring.
I read for the 'ah-ha's,' the information that makes a light bulb go off in my mind. I want to put information in my mind that is going to be the most beneficial to me, my family and my fellow man - financially, morally, spiritually, and emotionally.
As an adult, I'll give a writer 50 pages. If the book doesn't interest me in 50 pages, I'll say the heck with it - there are just too many other things to read. A child won't give you 50 pages.
My folks were busy. My dad was a teacher, and it was during the Second World War, and my mother was working. So I got my stories from films and books. I read a lot, and I love to read to this day.
When I was a kid, I read books that made me laugh but also made me shiver in terror. I wanted to make books that made other people feel the same way.
I don't often do a lot of that kind of research, but when it's something specific like 'Oz' - which I fortunately did not have a lot of experience with - I will. I read 'The Hot House,' about being on the inside at Leavenworth prison.
I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject.
In fifth grade, we had to write a story and read it in front of the class. When I read mine out, the class were just belly laughing. And I remember being like, 'This is the coolest!' So I want to dedicate my life to trying to make people laugh. I can't imagine doing anything else.
Codifying discrimination in our laws should be something we read about in American history, not on the front pages of today's American newspapers and magazines.
Since I did the SK Project and I partner with the United Nations World Food Program, I got a lot of different feedback from people online. Through social networks and through the Twitter. I read the comments and see 'em saying, 'People hungry here, Fif.'
I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.
I started thinking about what I've always been interested in: how people can't see things that are right in front of them. All you have to do is read the papers to see endless examples of smart people who can't see the nose on their faces.
For email, the old postcard rule applies. Nobody else is supposed to read your postcards, but you'd be a fool if you wrote anything private on one.
Fantasy is sort of a blank slate that everybody can project their own culture onto. Everybody can read it in their own way.
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
These 'free' applications ask for permission to read your emails, your text messages, listen to your phone calls, record video from your phone. Why else would someone spend millions developing an application which they then give away? Kind-hearted, maybe? Get real.
I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can't prop my eyes open anymore - sometimes rather late.
