John Larroquette Quotes

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.

One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

There's a different experience when you're reading a book rather than when you're seeing something on screen. When you're seeing a movie or TV show, it's a three-dimensional experience you're in the middle of, but when you're reading something, you're suppling the reality with your imagination.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

When you read a book [The Hunger Games], you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination. In the book, it's great when she can push a button and food comes up, as per your order.

I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn't have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn't exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly does that, can help us for the rest of our lives.

I think I made a mistake with [Jane] Austen by reading all six in a row. There are similarities to the plots so by the time I got to the last one I could anticipate what was happening too easily. But her characterizations are amazing.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.

I don't believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.

It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.

There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It’s one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we’re reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.

When I was a young boy, I loved spending hours in St. Franics Xavier's school library at Saint Louis University. The feel of the books in my hands and the magical new worlds I discovered always drew me back to that fantastic place. Each time I visited, I could expect to find a new adventure and from time to time use my imagination to revisit my favorite place and enjoy Green Eggs and Ham in a house, with a mouse, on a train, on a plane, in a box, with a fox.

When you're reading Chekov, you're in this world that he's created. I never would have created that world. I don't know anything about that time period or that setting or those groups of people or what those experiences were, but oh my gosh, it's amazing to daydream on it and put yourself there.

I think of reading as like a medicine cabinet.

Some difficulty is warranted and other difficulty I think is gratuitous. And I think I can tell the difference. There are certainly very difficult poets that I really enjoy reading.

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

I think anything that opens my mind and triggers my imagination I'm reading. I like to read science fiction and imagine the character. Anything that keeps my imagination flowing.

An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.

Reading is an escape, an education, a delving into the brain of another human being on such an intimate level that every nuance of thought, every snapping of synapse, every slippery desire of the author is laid open before you like, well, a book.