Eric Bana Quotes

When I barely got into college, the one thing I could do was write, so I became an English major.

I graduated with an English degree and worked for awhile in academic publishing.

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

I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.

I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

I went to University College London and read English literature, then realised if you were interested in story and narrative, film was the way to go.

Only a reader can become a writer. Develop a lively intellect and the ability to become interested in anything, no matter how mundane it might seem at first. Look for the story. Develop an eye for detail. Feed your mind and your brain: learn as much as you can about everything you can.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

At Harvard, I majored in English Literature.

I'm not going to sit here and go to college for something that I don't care about.

I think writing and reading are completely synergistic; not necessarily in that one has to be a good reader to be a good writer or vice versa, but that they so inform each other.

A writer can be subjective, even digressive, or introspective and certainly judgmental. This is a simplification, of course, but as a general rule, it holds true.

I might not have been academically gifted - I was bad at maths, and science was a struggle - but I was good at English literature and became hooked on theatre.

The fact that I had spent so many years doing media criticism and thinking really seriously about theme and structure did definitely help. Doing that for several years indirectly built a lot of tools that I would end up using when writing my own fiction.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

I got my degree in philosophy and English literature; those were my main interests.

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.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.