Rereading Quotes Page 2

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

The last book I read was the book I've been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.

Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger;

I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

My first book came out again - the re-issue from 2001.

I was rereading it to make sure that I didn't miss any mistakes, and I didn't know who had written some of these stories. I really didn't. I am a different person now. It's weird. I think if stories are good, they have to have a life of their own that's independent of the writer. I like to think of my characters out there in other peoples' heads. That's a nice thing to think about.

At the age of 9, I read David Copperfield by Dickens.

At 14, I read War and Peace by Tolstoy. They're both books I have reread regularly since.

When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort of tell which line is going to show up in reviews.

Salinger is such a terrific writer; he did so many great things. He is one of those writers that I still reread, simply because he makes me see the possibilities and makes me feel like writing. There are certain writers who put you in the mood to write. In the way a whiff of a cigar will bring back memories of a ballgame on a Saturday afternoon, reading Salinger makes me want to get to the typewriter.

When I started to get disillusioned with psychoanalysis I reread philosophy and was reminded of the constructivist notion that Epictetus had proposed 2,000 years ago: "People are disturbed not by events that happen to them, but by their view of them." I could see how that applied to many of my clients.

I reread "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton, the father of all sports books.

Aside from that, and books like "Out of Their League" by Dave Meggyesy, sports books generally pull their punches.

Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

I visited Paterson many years ago - 20 some years ago as a kind of day trip because of William Carlos Williams, because of Allen Ginsberg having lived there. And I went to the Great Falls and sat really in the exact same spot as Adam Driver does as Paterson. And I walked around the factory buildings, and I was rereading - I was reading at the time the epic length poem "Paterson" by Williams.

As I reread each book of the Bible, I fell in love all over again - not just with God's Word, but with God himself.

[People who have left the ISIS] say that there comes a moment when the inconsistencies and apparent hypocrisies of their sheikh lets them down, and they begin rereading scripture and find ways that vouch for a nonliteralist reading of the Koran.

Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

The only thing better than good English writing is - I can't think of anything.

You just don't pour it pureed over your potatoes. You savor it as if it were a find chardonnay. What on Earth does it matter if you stop and repeat a phrase, roll it around on your tongue, dart a few lines ahead and then suddenly come back and reread it? If the phrase is good enough, you are supposed to stop and rejoice in it.

[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there.

I don't think he knew much about people.

I'm starting to reread a bunch of Gandhi and it was kind of traumatic, because he was so clearly, unbelievably amazing. And the stuff that he is suggesting is so profoundly opposite from what is happening in our world today.

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don't like to reread them.

It's not the subject of narration that interests me, but the structure.

That's why I stay in touch with my old works, which I reread regularly. I don't hesitate to take up previously used images or even whole scenes.

My husband was getting his sea legs-rereading Joseph Conrad with a side order of C S Forester.

The way the housing market imploded is obviously not an easy thing to explain.

It's a little bit easier in a book - people can take their time, you can sort of go back and reread - but in a movie you've got two hours to not only explain things like collateralized debt obligations, but you also have to make it entertaining.

One great aim of revision is to cut out.

In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing.

One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.

The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.

I'm used to rereading e-mails, even, before sending them - a bit compulsive.

So this is high speed roller coaster for me!

When I have my manuscript finished, more or less, I type it myself, with two fingers. I type fast with two fingers. And then when it's ready, I reread, recorrect, and retype it. Everything is my own work. I do not give it to secretaries or to typists.

There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.

When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago.

When I go back and reread the stuff, I'm always floored by how deeply personal and revealing it actually is.

Usually when I put together a book like this Death-Ray hardcover or that Ghost World special edition, then I have to reread it and see if there is anything I want to change or any re-coloring I want to do. That's when I'm faced with the actual work. When I'm working, I'm too close to it. I'm sort of inside, and I can't see it at all. So when I have that experience of rereading it years later, it's jarring.

I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging.

After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.