A Quote by Sophie Thompson

I must confess that I'm not a great reader. At the moment I'm reading my son's 'Stig of the Dump' by Clive King and I've got a plant catalogue on the go. — © Sophie Thompson
I must confess that I'm not a great reader. At the moment I'm reading my son's 'Stig of the Dump' by Clive King and I've got a plant catalogue on the go.
I have always loved 'Stig of the Dump.' I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.
I grew up reading Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Isaac Asimov's nonfiction books, and Roald Dahl.
Stig: 'Of course, she'll sail rings around Wolfswind,' Hal: 'Then why didn't you tell him that?' Stig: 'I like my head where it is.
I was not a comic book reader, but my son is. My son wasn't really interested in reading books, which was hard for me because I love to read. It just didn't come naturally to my boy. So we kind of found comic books because they were fascinating to him. They were great stories.
As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'
I once picked up a woman from a garbage dump and she was burning with fever; she was in her last days and her only lament was: My son did this to me. I begged her: You must forgive your son. In a moment of madness, when he was not himself, he did a thing he regrets. Be a mother to him, forgive him. It took me a long time to make her say: I forgive my son. Just before she died in my arms, she was able to say that with a real forgiveness. She was not concerned that she was dying. The breaking of the heart was that her son did not want her. This is something you and I can understand.
I feel like I've got this great catalogue of songs sink or swim, it doesn't matter. If you've got that, you've got a lot.
My son Saif is an avid reader. He points me to books worth reading. I also must do the Indian Express crossword every morning, which is not too difficult and yet not too easy either.
We must be forewarned that only rarely does a text easily lend itself to the reader's curiosity... the reading of a text is a transaction between the reader and the text, which mediates the encounter between the reader and writer. It is a composition between the reader and the writer in which the reader "rewrites" the text making a determined effort not to betray the author's spirit.
I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.
I was 18 when I first visited London, I'm very provincial like that, but I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: This is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn't close.
From the moment one sets up for an author, one must be treated as ceremoniously, that is as unfaithfully, "as a king's favorite or a king.
The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.
Yet, there was once a king worthy of that name. That king was Arthur. It is paramount disgrace of this evil generation that the name of that great king is no longer spoken aloud except in derision. Arthur! He was the fairest flower of our race, Cymry's most noble son, Lord of the Summer Realm, Pendragon of Britain. He wore God's favour like a purple robe. Hear then, if you will, the tale of a true king.
It is easier for the reader to judge, by a thousand times, than for the writer to invent. The writer must summon his Idea out of nowhere, and his characters out of nothing, and catch words as they fly, and nail them to the page. The reader has something to go by and somewhere to start from, given to him freely and with great generosity by the writer. And still the reader feels free to find fault.
That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.
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