I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.
I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.
If you want to be a writer, don't worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
I, over the years, have always felt more comfortable if I could go into a projection room and look at a film and not really know what to expect. If you read the script first, you form all kinds of preconceptions about how things look, what the location's like, what the actors are like.
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
All around the world one heard or read that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
I don't think I had a script on 'King Kong.' But usually you read a script and then you go and audition for it. It's rare when there's no script. I sort of like the latter better, because I'm more successful at it.
If you don't think you want to go on a train and read the paper every day and work from nine to six at night, there was something about the uncertainty when I was younger which was very attractive.
I love to read aloud.
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
I used to work for a non-profit organization where I worked as a mentor and a counselor to first-generation college student and they kept asking me 'What can I read to try to know what I'm about to be in for,' and while I did have some good suggestions, I figured... I don't know that that book is out there, and that's sort of why I had to write it.
People who have seen me read usually come up afterwards and invite me to be a part of something.
I find it an absolute pleasure to read travel guides, especially the Michelin guides, and their description of places I know I'll probably never visit. I spend a large part of my life reading descriptions of restaurants.
I cannot recall any moment of clarity about becoming a writer. I always liked to read. That's what did it.
I tell my agent that I want to read everything.
I want to read a lot of comic books. I want to watch movies. I want to rest.
In India, we don't read thrillers; we read authors.
There is no doubt that it is more difficult to read and more difficult to write but I still manage.
My goal was to play drums, but my father made me take piano lessons. He told me I needed to learn to read music first, so I took lessons for six years. I thank God that he made me take those lessons, because it taught me a tremendous amount.
One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.
Usually, a number of events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will have read a poem or seen a picture that is lingering in my mind.
I personally, as a teenager, didn't like books I felt were trying to preach to me... I did not believe in happy endings. I wanted to read books which reflected life as I thought I knew it.
If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.
It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.
When I write, I tend to read it out loud to myself after. I'm a very uncomfortable reader, so it creates a distance between the text and me - it is a new way to see it.
I read some, and then visited with people involved in this curious, exciting and somewhat misunderstood sub-culture. I met with a fang maker, who offered to fit me for an exquisite pair.
People don't read bylines.
The whites, who are educated and civilized, swindle me, and I am not hard to swindle because I do not know how to read and write.
At the end of the day, I'm just trying to write a song that I like, that I'm not afraid to turn loose on the world. I do read a lot. I know a lot of people who read more, but I do try to keep a book in my hand most of the time, and I think that informs any kind of output that I'm going to have.
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.
I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife.
I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
One of the most memorable things I hear is when someone tells me that my books got a reluctant reader to read.
If you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams.
I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.
