Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.
You can read about it all you want, but there is no substitute for just doing it.
From the time I was a little boy I found myself reading history when I had a choice. I read a lot of things, but history had a special appeal for me.
When I was studying at the Iowa Writers School, I read a sports writer, Ron Maly, from the Des Moines Register. He was a good sports writer. I became real interested in the contrast between Lute Olson, who was the coach of Iowa at the time, and Ron Maly.
No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
To be honest, and this is terrible to admit, I hardly read any teen mystery books at all.
The same parts of my brain get as excited as when I study bio or read a novel and write a paper on it.
No skill shapes a child's future success in school or in life more than the ability to read.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.
When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.
Most of the time, when I get an idea that hinges on some science 'thing,' it will have been because of something I read or encountered months or years earlier rather than in the last few days.
I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.
Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.
I'm kind of ashamed to be a celebrity. I don't understand wanting to read about other people's dirty laundry. I think celebrity is the biggest red herring society has ever pulled on itself.
The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
I've had the same, full-time assistant and typist for eight or nine years now. She's read everything I've written, she types everything and does a good job, translates it and makes comments.
The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.
Unfortunately, the reporters ask the same questions over and over again. When reporters keep asking the same questions, they've got to recognize I may hear these questions 20 to 30 times in a matter of days. It gets to the point where I think, 'Read the other interviews!'
'Wuthering Heights' is portrayed as a great romantic novel, and when I read it again, I thought, 'How is this romantic? All these people are horrible to each other!'
Nearly everyone I met, worked with, or read about was my teacher, one way or another.
After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.
When I was younger I used to get my best writing done at night, but now it has to be during the day. I usually finish work at half past seven, then go back to the house to open a bottle of wine, have dinner, and then read or watch television.
You can never trust what you read.
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
For 'Rosa Luxemburg,' I read everything by and about her, but the first time I was stuck in that corset, I got an understanding of her that I'd never had before.
I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.
Stand up for your rights and be brave, and don't be intimidated. Read your Bible. That's really given me strength, and it will give you strength. Pray, and use God's name, Jehovah. And never tell a lie, ever.
Not to sound corny, but intelligence is big. Everything fades, and everything can be modified. But intelligence is something you can't fake. I'm not even talking about whether you can read a thesaurus backwards. But there is a beauty in common sense.
When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
I've got lots of good friends. I could have affairs. I can read a book all night, put the cat on the end of the bed. I can pick up my passport and go to France. I don't have to ask anybody.
Comics are cool. I read 'Batman' and 'Spawn'.
There's been an unquestionable decline in American culture. The education system is thin on the ground. People don't read as deeply and at length as they used to. And the media has been scattered into so many cable channels.
You can't sit here and try to predict what kind of character I'm going to be drawn to next. At the time when I read 'The Girl on the Train,' it wasn't like I was, 'Ooh, I want to play a hot mess next.'
But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.
