Excessively narrow reading is unhelpful, certainly. Reading only Serious Literature is no better than reading only trash in this respect.
My bedroom was filled with reading material: books salvaged from dustbins, books borrowed from friends, books with missing pages, books found in the street, abandoned, unreadable, torn, scribbled on, unloved, unwanted and dismissed. My bedroom was the Battersea Dogs' Home of books.
In bed at night, I could be reading some book, and I'll come across a sentence that's totally unrelated to some scene I did years ago. But I'll play the scene back in my mind and think, I did that wrong - I should've opened the door more slowly.
When I was fifteen, I used to run around reading 'Adbusters' and dumpster diving, trying to find ways to make the U.S. government unwind into chaos through hardcore punk and metal.
I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.
I wish I didn't have to validate myself by reading reviews.
Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there's not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.
I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme. I like reading those books, but in practice, I can't do it.
I tell you, the difference for me is between being victimized, terrorized, numbed by reading about different disasters, or reducing the anxiety by getting up and doing something about it, at whatever level.
It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.
I learned just recently, in fact, that a lot of people who read do not form a visual image from what they're reading. They just don't. They follow the events and get the resonance with the language, but they have only a vague, general idea of what the characters look like.
I've always preferred comics that really rely on visual storytelling. It's what makes comics special. Otherwise, you're better off reading a novel.
Growing up, I did quite a bit of reading on the mental side. My dad, who coached me, had us doing a lot of different types of mental work, like visualization. I read a couple of tennis books that talked about calming your nerves, belief, visualization, relaxing, breathing.
Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading 'The Naked and the Dead' made him despair of his own 'confined talents.'
I was taught a lot of Bible at home and had a voracious appetite for reading the Bible.
I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.
The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.
Reading 'Ghost Waltz' and 'Nine and a Half Weeks' side by side, Day's vulnerabilities come shimmering into view. Both books examine the consequences of relationships marked by withholding - be it her lover's effortless domineering humiliation or her parents' shutting the door on discussing Herr Seiler's deep-seated Nazi ties.
After reading and studying and getting in touch with the amount of information that I had while I was researching to play Pablo, it just reinforced the idea that I had that the war on drugs is a big flop.
Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
