Norton Simon Quotes

You don't want everyone to know everything about you.

No one is supposed to know about my personal life because that is supposed to be kept private.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.

I will find any excuse to go into somebody's study or ask them what they are reading. I can't think of too many other things that say what goes on in someone's head than the books they have.

Choose a book, ... Any book. Bring it here, and I'll show you what else the world can offer.

My business is not reading your messages. I don't have a business doing that. And it's against my values to do that. I don't want to read your private stuff.

I am thrilled at most corners that I turn walking down the street, I'm thrilled by most pages I turn when I'm reading a book thinking of what it's going to show and what it's going to make possible for tomorrow.

Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing.

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

Don't keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. You will be certain to find something you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. One discovery will lead to another, and before you know it, you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind, and really big discoveries are the result of thought.

Home is where your books are.

I don't mind opinions, because you like something or you don't like something, but to say things about your personal life? I'm like, "Man, let me quit reading this. 'Cause I'll stab everybody."

If we finished our work, the teacher would say, 'Now don't read ahead.' But sometimes I hid the book I was reading behind my geography book and did read ahead. You can hide a lot behind a geography book.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.

I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.

I don't even want to have things associated with my name on the internet - it's very dangerous.

Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way.

I prefer to be left alone with my books.

Something rubs off from everything you read, observe, and tinker with.

I've got a library copy of Gone with the Wind, a quart of milk and all these cookies. Wow! What an orgy!

Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.

Ooo,” said Alexia, fascinated, “it shrinks back down again. The books didn't detail that occurrence.” The earl laughed. “You must show me these books of yours.

The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster. We are forced to listen, open-mouthed, to other people's intimate conversations. Increasingly, we are all in our virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading or just staring dangerously at other people.

What are you reading for?