Rhys Ifans Quotes

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.

For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don't think you're very good at it - which is rubbish. You're missing out here.

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

We are not only what we read. We are how we read.

It's not my job to tell people what a work means.

a good reader makes a good book

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.

Learning (Shakespeare's plays) ...in school was a bit of a bore.

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

When I think about what part of my college experience came back in my work experience, I feel like it was learning how to read deeper, learning how to keep filling the movie up with more and more resonance.

Grandma frowned and yelled something in Russian. She could have been saying, 'Open up, your best friend is here.' On the other hand, it could have been, 'America is a great country because of canned ravioli.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.