reading

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

Tact is, after all, a kind of mind reading.

I am willing to accept thoughts I read when I have had similar ones myself. I am more willing to accept my own thoughts than those I read. Yet, having a new thought is not an action intended in advance; we don't set ourselves to have that specific new thought. If our own thoughts just "come to us" unbidden, why should we be less receptive to ones that come through reading? Perhaps because we spontaneously have only those thoughts to which we are already receptive. This may lead me to miss out on learning from those who can teach me most, those who think in a way completely different from mine. Unfortunately however, my trust in them cannot grow in the way described, so I continue to read them from an adversary stance.

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.

Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one.

Explaining why President Bush wasn't following up on his campaign pledge that there would be no loss of wetlands: He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech.

You write with ease to show your breeding, But easy writing 's curst hard reading.

Good reading makes for damn hard writing.

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the past centuries.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.