Pastoral Resources

In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.

Schools are really bad now. Schools are not only bad in reading, writing and arithmetic, they're worse in cultural aspects, like in music and art. They don't teach you anything.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

Your baby only needs a lot of light at night if he's reading or he's entertaining guests.

I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

The simultaneous reactions elicited all over the world by the reading of newspaper dispatches about the same events create, as it were, a common mental pulse beat for the whole of civilized mankind.

I like reading my bible, I like bible studies where I get together with others and talk about the word of God and how it relates to us and how we can change to become more like him.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.

To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed.

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

Yeah, that came out of a reading. It was great. It's such a fun crew to be with, and we all went out the night before and that really encouraged us to go out and get drunk.

When I'm reading material, if I'm a little bit afraid of a part and I'm willing to admit that to myself, then I'll do it, definitely. If I'm worried about being able to do it, to get it - I absolutely just love it.

I've given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself.

I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.