Pastoral Resources

It sounds extraordinary but it's a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.

After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.

I think people enjoy reading about money, but the people who are in charge of giving me guidance tell me not to talk about it in interviews. Why not? That's what everybody thinks about.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action.

That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column.

The attitude of the actor is his interpretation of what he reads, and the written word is what creates the role in the actor's mind, and I guess in reading the things that were given to me, I reacted as you guys saw me, you know.

I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.