Quotes About Reading

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.

When a young reader tells you that they'd never finished a book outside of school until they read yours, or that they really needed to hear something that one of your characters says or thinks... that's just rewarding and humbling.

Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.

If I have to pick one story that most influenced 'The Hunger Games,' it would be the Greek myth of Theseus, which I read when I was about 8 years old. In punishment for past deeds, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to a labyrinth. In the maze was this Minotaur, and it would eat them.

In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.

I'm not a big crime reader, but I'm reading Michael Connelly's 'The Reversal.' I'm going back to his novels. I'm also reading Keith Richards' 'Life.' I'm always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late '60s and early '70s and the youth culture becoming an industry.

I love getting things done. That's why I spend several hours a day reading productivity articles. And when the day is done, I bookmark the ones I didn't get to for later. I learned that trick in a productivity article.

Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.

Double vision makes reading the prompter very tricky.

If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.

The idea there were kids out there who didn't love to read and write just as much as I did struck me. So I went around schools and tried to make other kids love to read and write.

I was born a Roman Catholic but had never tried to read the Bible. Now, I ensure that I read it completely.

I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.

My nine-year-old was trying to read my spiel. When she tried to pronounce the word 'pharmaceutical,' it was frightening. She would love to argue in the Supreme Court one day. My son asked me, 'Mommy, why do you have to have so many arguments? Why can't you have agreements?'

I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library.

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

When you have to negotiate for survival, and you have to know how to read rooms, and you have to know who the bad guys in the rooms are - who has the gun in their pocket, who's just going to brandish it, and who's going to actually pull the trigger. So I think that's just a natural instinct that comes with coming from where I come from.

I loved the material when I first read it, and the experience of making the film was a great one. So when we came around to complete the trilogy, I just signed on board without even reading the scripts because the experience of the first film was so good.

For bedtime reading, I usually curl up with a good monograph on quantum physics or string theory, my specialty. But since I was a child, I have been fascinated by science fiction. My all-time favorite is 'The Foundation Trilogy,' by Isaac Asimov.

I read 'The Hobbit' but not a single one of the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. I had to lie about this pretty much all through high school. I still say it apologetically.

In crime fiction, I cut my teeth on early Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and Alan Furst. I always loved the writing of Hemingway and Faulkner. Cormac McCarthy's 'Border Trilogy' has been a huge influence; I think I read those novels four times.

'The Dublin Magazine' has been edited with good taste, and it is very agreeable reading, but to speak quite candidly, I do not believe in the future of any literary journal any more than I believe in the future of the Trinity.

Reading is a heady thing. You can be into the action of someone's thoughts and take a whole trip down someone's ruminations while seconds tick by in the world that they're in, but you can't really do that in film.