Al Sharpton Quotes

In my downtime, you'll mostly find me curled up with a book. I love reading biographies. My favourites are those of Dalai Lama, Osama Bin Laden, and Einstein.

I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.

I read a lot - and I read a variety of genres.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

Other than fiction and poetry I tend to read history.

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J. D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader.

I don't watch a huge amount of telly. I read a lot. I'm reading at the moment 'Freedom,' by Jonathan Franzen, a great big brick of a book, and I'm loving it.

I'd love to go back to school for philosophy. I love philosophy, so I'm always reading philosophy books, annoying my girlfriend with that type of stuff.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.

I don't read much fiction because I already read a lot of scripts, so I want to learn about the world.

In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

I'm not a great fiction reader. I love history. I love history and philosophy.

As a reader, I try to love all the literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most often.

When I do read, it tends to be serious books like autobiographies and if I've met a famous person, I'll read up on them.

I've always been a person that thinks nonfiction is more interesting than fiction, I love to read presidential biographies.

As a reader, I read quite widely.

I tried to fortify myself with the best nonfiction and fiction I could lay my hands on, from the essays of James Baldwin and Joan Didion, to the stories and novels of Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolano and Celine. Distinctive voices like these were a source of constant nourishment on all range of matters, from punctuation to philosophy.

Anything by D. H. Lawrence or Jean Genet - 'Zen Mind,' 'Beginner's Mind' is my daily go to for non-fiction.

Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels - make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by.