Nobody wants to read about the honest lawyer down the street who does real estate loans and wills. If you want to sell books, you have to write about the interesting lawyers - the guys who steal all the money and take off. That's the fun stuff.
I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.
You read in any war stories - World War II, whatever - that there are many, many heroes. There are the main stories you always hear about, but there are all these other little people that did things that were very important that we don't always know about.
I have never read for entertainment, but rather for understanding and to satisfy my eager curiosity.
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
It's really important to remember that most people in the public eye are human for a start and a lot of things that you read in the media get slightly misconstrued and manipulated.
I had never seen 'Vogue.' I didn't read fashion magazines, I read 'Time' and 'Newsweek.'
You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.
Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
I can read and write. I went to school for six years. I just couldn't continue.
Books guided my life from high school, and the greatest, most interesting, most provocative, funniest, smartest people who ever lived in the last 200 or 300 years wrote those books. I would fall in love with Victor Hugo and read not just 'Les Miserables,' but 'Bug-Jargal' and 'The Toilers of the Sea' and so forth.
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
I don't think, until the end, I had read a positive review of Boy Meets World.
I think I read films having grown up around the pre-production and post-production aspect of the filmmaking medium, a lot more than most young people who are in acting would have experienced. I do think about scripts in a different way. I can't just read a script as an actor. I don't know how to do that.
I was a Charles Schulz kind of guy. I didn't read comics books. The Warner Bros. guys were great - Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng.
As a 14-year-old with anxiety, to have read about that in a book would have helped me so much.
I don't read reviews until after I'm done with a production, but when I do finally get to them, I'm always sort of floored by what the bad ones say.
The directors thought, They understand nothing in the real economy, in real life. They read some stupid books, and they came from the moon to the earth, and maybe in one month they will disappear.
Back when I went to Louisiana State University a million years ago, we got the Baton Rouge paper. But if you wanted to read 'The New York Times' or 'The Wall Street Journal,' you had to go to the reading room of the student union, and you got the edition several days after it had been published, and you had to read it on a wooden stick.
I get up and cook for my kids, who really like my scrambled eggs. Or we make pancakes and the requisite bacon. The kids either play or watch cartoons, and Daddy gets to read the 'New York Times' and do his puzzle.
It has taken Thomas Harris 11 years to publish the sequel to 'The Silence of the Lambs,' which suggests that while everyone was desperate to read it, he was not desperate to write it.
I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.
Comics were not something that as a young kid you could say you were into in Manchester, Missouri. Kids did not read comic books back then.
I've always loved words. I ate up all the books I could get my hands on, and when I couldn't get books, I read candy wrappers and labels on cereal and toothpaste boxes.
I ride horseback - arthritic knees permitting - or listen to opera. Sometimes I cook. I used to do needlework, but it's hard on my hands now, so I only do it occasionally, but I like it. And, of course, I read.
Since I got a really bad review when I was, like, 28 in 'The New York Times,' I don't read reviews anymore.
That's really what was wonderful for me growing up, since I got to know so many of the songwriters who liked me and thought I had talent. They would then tell me how to read a lyric and sing a song, and challenge me to try and find a different end to a song.
In 35 years of being in the media, I've had all this mud flung at me many, many times. It's not the first time. It's nothing unusual. I've been through it all before and the best way to deal with it is not to read them.
I never really trained to be a musician, but I've been playing guitar since I was around, like, 13 years old. For me, the guitar has always been the instrument that I've played. I play a little piano. I taught myself everything by ear. I don't read music at all, which has not really been a hindrance.
People will read into what you say no matter what, so it doesn't matter to me.
With fantasy, one often has to think of a well-loved series before narrowing the selection to a favourite book. So it is with Zelazny. I've read his 'Princes in Amber' books so often, I know them almost verbatim, so much so that I am now trying to forget them so I can return to them with renewed pleasure.
As is said about most writers, on the one hand, all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing. On the other hand, the more I read, the more I felt this well-known fissure between me and the world.
I remembered a mantra that one of my teachers used to tell me at drama school, that every thought will pass across your face. Even if you're thinking about Shreddies the camera will read it.
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
And really, the basis, I think, of achieving some success in what I want to do today comes from my mother's push to get me to read and to make something of myself from the standpoint of an education.
