A Quote by Gail Collins

You know, I have a lot of books on my iPad, but when I try to read them, I find myself wandering off to play games. Those are books I'm interested in. I can't imagine what would have happened to me in college if my biology class had been on the same computer as "Words With Friends" and "Doom."
You know, I have a lot of books on my iPad, but when I try to read them, I find myself wandering off to play games. Those are books I'm interested in. I can't imagine what would have happened to me in college if my biology class had been on the same computer as 'Words With Friends' and 'Doom.'
I went off and read the books after the audition and I read all four books in one sitting - you know - didn't wash, didn't eat, drove around with them on the steering wheel like a lunatic. I suddenly understood why my friends, who I'd thought where slightly backward, had been so addicted to these children's books. They're like crack.
I read books when I was a kid, lots of books. Books always seemed like magic to me. They took you to the most amazing places. When I got older, I realized that I couldn't find books that took me to all of the places I wanted to go. To go to those places, I had to write some books myself.
Not so, however, with books, for books cannot change. A thousand years hence they are what you find them to-day, speaking the same words, holding forth the same cheer, the same promise, the same comfort; always constant, laughing with those who laugh and weeping with those who weep.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.
...Generally people don't recomend this type of book at all. It is far too interesting. Perhaps you have had other books recomended to you. Perhaps, even, you have been given books by friends, parents, teachers, then told that these books are the type you have to read. Those books are invariably described as "important"- which in my experience, pretty much means that they're boring. (words like meaningful and thoughtful are other good clues.)
Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.
One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'
I think books find their way to you when you need them. Whenever I feel like I'm not going to live to read all the books I want to read, I remind myself that the important ones find their way to me.
During long car rides to the set, after I study my script, I go onto my iPad to read books and play games.
I wasn't a very outgoing child. I read a lot of books and the characters in each of the books became like imaginary friends - I immersed myself in the different worlds. I always hated finishing books that I really loved for that reason.
I have learned that my assignment is to write books for people who do not like to read books. I really try to connect with people who are not given to spending a lot of time with an open book. Pay day to me is when somebody comes up to me and says, "I never read books but I read yours." I have a heart for that person.
I never look at fashion magazines. I find them incredibly boring. To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I've got books I need to read. More people should read books. It's the most concentrated experience you can have. You know, all those incredible geniuses concentrated their lifetimes' experiences in books. It's much better than chattering away to somebody who's never read anything and knows nothing at all.
Sometimes I read the same books over and over and over. What's great about books is that the stuff inside doesn't change. People say you can't judge a book by its cover but that's not true because it says right on the cover what's inside. And no matter how many times you read that book the words and pictures don't change. You can open and close books a million times and they stay the same. They look the same. They say the same words. The charts and pictures are the same colors. Books are not like people. Books are safe.
The writer has a life and a personality but the problem of today is that most of those writers have exactly the same life; they belong to the same social class, the same milieu, they have the same experiences. Once you read one of those books, you have read them all. And this is a problem.
I am a product of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
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