I’m reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.
We’ve done fMRI scans of people taking the ‘Reading the Eyes’ test, and what we’ve found is that the amygdala lights up in trying to figure out people’s thoughts and feelings. In people with autism, they show highly reduced amygdala activity.
The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.
I’ve always loved to paint – I was studying to do an art degree when I was approached to become a model – and I’ve being doing some design work as well. I also love just having a quiet time, sitting in my little library at home in Brooklyn and reading or watching documentaries or listening to music.
I’m not sure that the benefit – as a writer and as a citizen – that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
In a time not distant, it will be possible to flash any image formed in thought on a screen and render it visible at any place desired. The perfection of this means of reading thought will create a revolution for the better in all our social relations.
On holidays, I spent time alone at home watching a movie, reading a book, and contemplating. Now that I think about it, if I hadn’t had that time, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do acting.
That is what I did with Jack, and that’s why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.
Some of the things you read you get an immediate reaction to so I’ve stopped reading things now. I do worry about my family though. Some people do try some nasty things to get at them and try and get a reaction from them.
Oprah’s got good politics, she’s got a good heart, and she’ll have us all up Jazzercising at six in the morning. This cannot be a bad thing, and reading a book while we’re Jazzercising. So America would be better off if Oprah were president.
I probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.
I was in my mid-teens when someone gave me a copy of ‘Pears Encyclopaedia of Myth and Legends’ as a birthday present. It sat on my shelves for many months before I looked at it. When I did, I couldn’t stop reading it.
The occult stuff, I grew up having a fascination about world religion and that fascination grew into other religions and other things and I kind of dabbled my way into the occult and started reading about the occult.
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
I’m a quiet person’s nightmare – the only time I shut up is when I’m reading, because I’m a book geek.
The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.
We live in such a celebrity-driven culture, but all those people have to go buy toilet paper, and all those people have products they use and their favorite sweet treats. They all have to write to-do lists, and they’re all reading books – well, hopefully most people are doing those things.
It’s really unfair to working women in America who read celebrity news and think, ‘Why can’t I lose weight when I’ve had a baby?’ Well, everyone you’re reading about has money for a trainer and a chef. That doesn’t make it realistic.
Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.
My mother is an actress, and she used to drag me from theater to theater and reading to reading.
If the critics are right that I’ve made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.
It’s always hard when you’re playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There’s a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone’s idea of that.
I’m snobby about books that aren’t crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there’s no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I’m like, ‘Gah, this obviously isn’t a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?’
History must share with reading, writing and arithmetic first rank as the most important subjects in the curriculum. Understanding the issues on which citizens of a republic are expected to vote is impossible without an understanding of the past.
I’ve been reading this little book. It’s called the Russian constitution. And it says that the only source of power in Russia is the people. So I don’t want to hear those who say we’re appealing to the authorities. Who’s the power here?
But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.
We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a ‘fresh’ brain – one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.
What struck me first on reading the Ten Hoeve-Jacobson paper was how small the consequences of the radiation release from the Fukushima reactor accident are projected to be compared to the devastation wrought by the giant earthquake and tsunami.
As far as characters are concerned, Alan Partridge makes me wet myself. I’m currently reading the book and have started talking like him as an unfortunate consequence.
Reading is important.
Every time there’s a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.
I was forever reading outside of the field as well as in it.
Look at Julie Etchingham and Katie Derham, none of us are spring chickens frankly, I don’t think people want to watch someone who’s wet behind the ears, you have to look like you understand what you are reading about.
I get readings, I sometimes get five a week. You’ll feel like a schizophrenic by the end of that week. I don’t know who I am any more. You’ll be in conversation with a friend and start spitting out dialogue.
Reading a book, watching a movie, going to a play, it’s transporting, and very, very exciting. And to be a part of that, creating things with your imagination, whoa.
Yes, I’ve listened to just a few audiobooks – but hope to listen to more. I’ve wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.
The difference between ‘lighght’ and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn’t have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.
I’ve been reading horror since I was five years old.
At the same time, reading an action script… It makes me wonder. Was The Matrix a good script? I don’t know.
With ‘Nip/Tuck,’ I had never even done anything before I got on that show. They created that character for me. I was reading for something else.
I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren’t really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.
If you’re in the fake news, I’m reading your emails.
To love one’s country, the governance should be good. But politicians are addicts of power. It is because they don’t read that they have become so inhuman. Reading is what makes humans, humans.
We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
If I don’t get the goose-bump factor when I’m reading it than I can’t do it.
When I first read the script for ‘A Little Chaos,’ I just loved reading it, as it is a really lovely, accessible, contemporary period film.
Melissa Joan Hart’s reading is, by far, one of the most emotional, exceptional readings I’ve ever done.
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I’ve read it three times all the way through. It’s a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don’t just read things I agree with.
I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.
I can spend the day without writing or reading, but I can’t spend a day without listening to music.
But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can’t remember ever reading a story without judging it.
Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
