In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

With 'Versace,' after I had gotten the , it was two weeks of preparation before I started filming, and I had read Maureen Orth's book; I had been able to get a hold of photos and really start to inhabit the mind of David Madson.

I read so slow. If I have a script, I'm going to read it five times slower than any other actor, but I'll be able to tell you everything in it. It kills me that there are standardized tests geared towards just one kind of child.

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.

I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light - not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

I like to read Octavia E. Butler's 'Wild Seed' over and over again. And J. California Cooper's 'The Wake of the Wind.' That one makes me cry from joy. I'll mourn - I'll actually mourn - and then I'll cry from joy. She's wonderful.

Sometimes I have a melody in my head; sometimes it's just a verse. I read lines from a book or movies that I watch and grab a few quotes and start writing on paper. From there, I record a really rough version and work on the song.

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.

The bottom line is this: It is not, in a country that was founded on the values of individual liberty and personal responsibility, the job of the government (read: completely uninvolved taxpayers) to pay for someone else's mistake.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.

I was dyslexic - was, still am - 'cause I would see words that weren't there. And people just started laughing, and I thought, well, this is a good way to make a living. I'll just go downtown to read and have people laugh, you know?

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.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

I was an English major in college who concentrated in African-American literature and culture. So I read quite a few slave narratives and stories of escape, and I grew up in Ohio, which was a common stop on the Underground Railroad.

Orthodoxy is like an abyss of beauty that's just endless. I have read the Bible many times. But after fasting, and being baptized Orthodox, it's like reading a whole new Bible. You see the depth behind the words so much more clearly.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

This new movie, 'Full Moon in Blue Water,' I loved the idea of working with Gene Hackman, who is a great actor, but when I read the script, I threw it right into the trash can, because I didn't like this woman. She was just a doormat.

I did, although I didn't read from page 1 to page 187 but I read chunks of it. I did a little bit of science when I was in the university so I was able to understand the graphs and pie charts and stuff like that. It was extremely dry.

It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.

Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence's biography on him, 'Hold on to Your Dreams,' one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

The more I read about the rules the great orators used, the more I realised, of course, this is how you stir people's hearts, and you persuade and cajole and move people out of fixed positions. The techniques are quite menacingly easy.

Those who read the Scriptures and judge for themselves, not resting satisfied with the perverted application of the text, do not find the distinction that theology and ecclesiastical authorities have made in the condition of the sexes.

In America, we have bible-reading applications: every single one of those applications asks permission to turn on your microphone, your camera; it wants permission to read your e-mails and the right to send e-mails wherever it chooses.

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.

Everybody told me that Taiwan is a very polite society and that people don't like gossip and scandals here. But they just pretend they don't like it. We have, by far, the biggest newspaper in Taiwan. They just buy it to read it at home.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

A friend of mine wrote a script, a feminist romantic comedy. She had a feminist scholar consult on it. My friend said, 'Oh, my friend Gillian read it and really loved it.' She goes, 'Gillian Jacobs, you mean: Britta Perry, feminist icon?'

I don't analyze what I'm doing. I've read convincing interpretations of my work, and sometimes I've noticed something that I wasn't aware of, but I think, at this point, people read into my work out of habit. Or I'm just very, very smart.

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

When I read 'Rocky V,' it was a terrific story, a great script. Rocky died at the end. He has this devastating fight with Tommy Gunn, ends up in an ambulance with his head in Adrian's lap, and by the time they get to the hospital, he's dead.

As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

Typing and read receipts make a lot of sense for messaging. You write a letter, you put it in an envelope, you send it to a friend, and you want to know when they get it. It's like FedEx - they let you know when the package gets dropped off.

I can't read all the books I want to read, I can't watch all the phenomena that interest me in the world. The work calls me, and sometimes I wonder whether this is an obsession and I should drop it, or it's a necessity I'm obliged to fulfill.

When I was about six or seven, I did this character reenactment performance where I read a monologue from 'Peter Pan.' I got into a complete Peter Pan outfit and did a little paragraph from the script - and I ended up winning an award for it.

I try to get in quiet time and book time, but really, the only time I ever get that is when I'm on an airplane - I have a fear of flying, but I actually love flying because it's the only time I can sleep, and it's the only time I get to read.

For me, books were my source of affirmation. Alice Walker, Audrey Lord - it was these authors who wrote about their experiences. It was this weird thing where I was censored in terms of what I could watch but not in terms of what I could read.

My grandfather, Jesse Bowman, was of Abenaki Indian descent. He could barely read and write, but I remember him as one of the kindest people I ever knew. I followed him everywhere. He showed me how to walk quietly in the woods and how to fish.

'The Cardturner,' while it has bridge in it, you certainly don't need to know how to play bridge to read it. It's basically a book about relationships - between Alton and his great-uncle, and Alton and his friends, and how it changes his life.

Just as our ancient ancestors drew animals on cave walls and carved animals from wood and bone, we decorate our homes with animal prints and motifs, give our children stuffed animals to clutch, cartoon animals to watch, animal stories to read.

Nobody wants to read about the honest lawyer down the street who does real estate loans and wills. If you want to sell books, you have to write about the interesting lawyers - the guys who steal all the money and take off. That's the fun stuff.

You've got to invest in the world, you've got to read, you've got to go to art galleries, you've got to find out the names of plants. You've got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We're amazing people.

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