I was a total nerd growing up. I'd rather sit home and read a novel on New Year's Eve and say, 'Wow, I read the whole thing in one night!' That was my idea of a big time.
I love books, and I love to read, and I had ideas for books that I thought would be neat to read.
We're at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity... Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That's boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don't exist.
I'm Cancer and Gemini cusp, so I read both and pick the one I like best. I read horoscopes but claim not to believe any of it.
No, I had not read any other comedian's book. Not that I don't enjoy other comedians; I'm just not a reader.
It's weird because I am accessible to people on Twitter, and I can choose to read good things or mean things, and people can reach out to me directly and tell me how much they hate me or love the song. It's a very strange new paradigm as an artist to find yourself among this kind of connectivity.
I find I have to give myself a day when I just shut myself off and do nothing but read.
I don't read my own reviews and I haven't for probably 15 years. I read other people's reviews, though.
Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I've been really lucky to know her. She's a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer.
I'd read Stone Cold's biography about how he lived on, like, raw potatoes, and I thought, this is all part of it. This is what wrestlers do, and this is what I'm going to do.
The last book I read before I wrote my first book - 'Ghosts of Manhattan' - was 'The Gold Coast' by DeMille. I loved it, and it gave me a lot of energy to start into my own.
When I read 'Dream of Red Mansions,' I was really struck by the fact that it was built differently from a lot of genre works. Specifically, a lot of the events that should have taken centre-stage - wars, social upheavals - were seen entirely through the eyes of the women of a Chinese household.
But I honestly don't read critics. My dad reads absolutely everything ever written about me. He calls me up to read ecstatic reviews, but I always insist that I can't hear them. If you give value to the good reviews, you have to give value to the criticism.
I bought myself a rubber brain, familiarized myself with its many parts, listened intently, and read more. In fact, I read obsessively, as my husband has told me repeatedly. He has even suggested that my rapacious reading resembles an addiction.
Those quotations were really quite obscure. Anyone can see that he is a very well read man.
I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?
I'm embarrassed to say this, but I shy away from memoirs. My feeling is always that I'm saving them for later, so I guess that means I'll reach a point when I read nothing else.
I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
I used to read comics when I was a kid.
When I first read 'The River,' I had theories on what it was about, but once we got into rehearsal, I realized it's much simpler: It's about how human beings try to connect. The play holds a mirror up to the audience, and they take from it what's relevant to their lives.
I really can't write fantasy. I cannot invent a world which does not exist. And I can't read fantasy either. As soon as I realise I'm reading a book that hasn't got its roots in a reality I can comprehend, I switch off.
Oh, I love to read more than anything. I always love the 'New Stories From the South' anthologies - I think it's the best short fiction collection anywhere, just filled with treasures.
My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.
I'm not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten.
I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.
I spend a lot of time in my bed. It's a good comfy one with a tartan bedspread. It's the only place I can read without straining my neck, and I take an afternoon nap, which is my reward for making enough money from my writing now not to have to work. I never get up in the morning before 11.30.
It's funny - I read that women look to chiseled-faced guys for one-night stands, and to round-faced guys for marriage. When I'm rounder in the face, I like to say, 'This is my long-term look.' Or 'This is my wife-and-kids look right here.'
I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.
I wish I had more time to read. I'm always traveling.
There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.
One of the things is, I don't read my own press. I never watch myself.
I think every parent knows that, like, boys and girls are different. And we just don't take that into account in schools on those things like required reading lists. 'Cause that was my experience, say, with my son, who had to read 'Little House on the Prairie' when he was in third grade.
I'd always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s as substitutes for experience.
My one remaining professional ambition is to read the shipping forecast. I live in hope.
Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.
The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.
