A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it's time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.
I'm probably wouldn't do anything differently if I had to do it again. Every little thing that happens to you, good and bad, becomes a little piece of the puzzle of who you become. Every successful person you read about - Warren Buffett, Bill Gates - they all say pretty much the same thing. 'Do what you love.' I know I did.
Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page.
I can always tell when I'm about to start writing. I go through cycles in reading. When I'm beginning to start to write something, I start reading what I think of as good literature. I read things with wonderful language.
I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.
But why should I read what somebody else thinks of my life when I know the real story?
But I don't read or listen for pleasure. I have too much else to do.
We went to Ibiza, and I was on Ritalin, and, for a kid who couldn't concentrate, I read a 200-page book on King Arthur, and my mum just hated it. She said it just wasn't me.
Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.
I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.
The best way to learn to write is to read in the genre you might be interested in; then, you need to actually sit down and write. In a lot of cases, the first book you write will not get published. Do not get hung up on that. Start a second book.
It was a sort of organic thing. I never went, 'I must be an actress.' I thought, 'I think I could do this. I think I could be good at this.' I would just get sort of hungry when I read something I thought I can do well, whether it was in books or in scripts or if I saw a certain movie. It sort of happened quite naturally.
When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.
The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you've put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don't do that now.
I read a lot of scripts and so many are clearly a knockoff of one familiar genre or another.
Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.
Unfortunately, the public might not know that we get a script usually two days before shooting. So sometimes I'm shooting an episode and don't even know how it's going to end because I haven't read that yet.
I love novels, and I read them more than anything, but stories cut in sharp and hard and are able to reveal things in a different way: they're highly charged, a slightly newer form, and inherently more contemporary.
We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready - even eager - to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it.
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
'The Great Gatsby' is a book I have read a few times, and it seems to get heavier every time I come to visit.
Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.
A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.
Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.
The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself.
Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.
You'd go in, read the script once for timing and then you would sit around and play games. The sound effects people would come in and we would do a dress rehearsal so they could get the effects and the music cues in place. Then you would wait until you went on the air.
The one book necessary to be understood by a divine, is the Bible; any others are to be read, chiefly, in order to understand that.
I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.
In my writing class, we never, ever talk about the writing - ever. We never address a story that's been read. I also won't let anyone look at the person who's reading. No eye contact; everybody has to draw a spiral. And I would like to do a drawing class where we could talk about anything except for the drawing. No one could even mention it.
Comic books and The Chronicles of Narnia. My mother used to read those to me and my twin brother growing up.
When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.
Having spent so much time in a fictional world, I prefer to read about the real world.
Reading is a lot like eating for me: If I try to read a book I'm not hungry for, I won't enjoy it, but if I wait until I have a real appetite for something, I'll devour it.
You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
We need to pray and read the Bible every day, and regardless of whatever else happens to you, that tends to keep you close to Him, because you are constantly in touch through His Word.
