A Quote by John Updike

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

John Updike

Quote Topics

Afraid Book Child Cowardly Know Lazy Reading Something Want

Quote Author

John Updike
American - Novelist
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly.

Simon Pegg

I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.

David Mamet

Reading the [The Verso Book of Dissent] is like encountering the best version of our angry selves.

Jonathan Messinger

I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly. I get up early in the morning and go to work. I love to write.

David Mamet

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn’t achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who’s reading aloud—it’s the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.

Mem Fox

I'm not going to make judgments about what people are reading. I just want them to be reading. And I think reading one book leads to another book.

Kate DiCamillo

Reading is a joy for my kids, and to swing in a hammock on a lazy summer day reading a good book just goes with summer.

Marcia Gay Harden

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

If I'm not afraid when I'm reading a script, that means I know I've done it before. If I read something and think, Wow, I can't play this part, then I want to play it more.

Linda Fiorentino

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

Susan Sontag

I don't know if [Samuel] Beckett is something you ever bring to the beach - get out of the water, towel off, and start reading some of "The Unnamable." Although, because it's the kind of book you can open to any page and start reading, it is beach reading in that way.

David Duchovny

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

Maya Angelou

If a parent doesn't want his/her child to read a book then there is always an alternative text to read. But the book banners want to control what every child reads.

Sherman Alexie

You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time.

Steven Wright

If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?