I think the reason I don't read is because, when I'm reading, I feel like I'm missing out on something else. You know, What are my friends doing? Where's my girlfriend?
Silence is difficult and arduous; it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware - aware of your speech, aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence.
It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too." Are you, Joe?" Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!
I really don't watch enough TV to know about the impact. In my experience as a TV writer, I would say is the exact opposite - it's very constricted, all having to conform to a form. My sense of fiction writing is not to think about rules but to be driven by the characters and their stories. I often ask myself what's at risk here, who needs what, and how are they going to get it. There has to be a reason for the reader to stop living their own life and start reading your book.
The saving of empty beer and liquor bottles is a strange college phenomenon. I bet most of you college students reading this right now have some empties on a shelf in your room. Everyone knows how much college kids like to drink, do we really need to display it? It's a good thing, though, that this trend stops after college. Wouldn't it be weird if your parents had empty wine bottles up on their bedroom wall?
From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader.
The mind must be developed by you alone. There is no way for others to do the work and for you to reap the results. Reading someone else's blueprint of mental progress will not transfer its realizations to you. You have to develop them yourself.
What, however, left a deep impression on me was the reading of the Ramayana before my father. During part of his illness my father was in Porbandar. There every evening he used to listen to the Ramayana.
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.