In reading our newspapers today, we can see how God is setting the table, getting everything in order, preparing the way for Christ to return.
I never think about actual things when I'm painting. I'm not thinking, "I'm going to put a person here, a tree here and a bird there. " The beginning stage is always the sound. From that, slowly, stories come about based on what I'm reading or thinking at the time, but if I didn't have that sound I don't know what I would do.
Early on, people invested in me because of my letters and then, somehow, after they invested, they stopped reading them.
The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.
In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of.
Thinking, not for the first time, that life should come with a trapdoor. Just a little exit hatch you could disappear through when you´d utterly and completely mortified yourself. Or when you had spontaneous zit eruptions. “Good book?” he asked, taking it from her and reading the subtitle, “A Guide for Good Girls Who (Sometimes) Want to Be Bad,” out loud. But life did not come with a trapdoor.
I cannot recall, in any of my reading, a single instance of a prophet who applied for the job.
reading a good book in silence is like eating chocolate for the rest of your life and never getting fat.
One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.
I've just finished reading a book about the brilliant Margaret Rutherford. She wasn't a beauty, but inside she was absolutely blazing and passionate about her work. She's one of those life-affirming characters.
I definitely rediscovered reading for pleasure by devoting such a large swath of my time to sitting on airplanes. I am now painfully adept at removing my shoes so as to have the least amount of foot surface area touching an airport floor.
But, yes, I learned everything working in theater. I learned the importance of community - I was constantly going to play readings, stand-up nights, improv. nights.
This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary.
Because reading is one of the joys of life, and once you begin, you can't stop, and you've got so many stories to look forward to.
Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse -- there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.
I very much like doing voiceovers, and I also like doing readings. I do books on tape and stuff. I have fun with it.
Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces.
Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us.
I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape.
A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
