"I'm a huge Dirty Dancing fan. I feel like I should be reading [William] Shakespeare, but I'm watching Baby not be in a corner."
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Reading quotes
Reading
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Reading quotes (page 53 of 330)
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"Every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don't lay on complications that aren't necessary."
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"My rule has been, so far as I could have any rule (I could have no cast-iron rule) - my rule has been, to write what I have to say the best way I can - then lay it aside - taking it up again after some time and reading it afresh - the mind new to it. If there's no jar in the new reading, well and good - that's sufficient for me."
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"I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it."
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"My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right."
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"There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world."
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"Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization."
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"..holding a book but reading the empty spaces."
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"You have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes, or you can just say, "The hell with you! I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading."
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"From candlelight to early bedtime, I read."
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"Students of reading, writing and common arithmetick . . . Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history . . . should be rendered . . . worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens."
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"I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song."
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"I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained."
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"For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets."
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"To write you had to read so I backed into reading."
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"When I write a novel I start each morning by reading for 20 minutes."
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"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it."
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"I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book."
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"If you have a character that seems to be all perfect, it's hard to relate to him because when you read a story you really want to empathize with the character that you are reading about. And it's hard to empathize with someone who is flawless and who has no problems."
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"The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse."
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