Jean Rhys Quotes

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

If I'm engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.

I go to books and to nature as a bee goes to the flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.

Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.

In fact, every day I'll read a chapter of some art book. I don't know why. It's just a habit.

Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.

What I do is, I'm like a disease that infects real people and I take them over. We can start off in a very journalistic mode describing a character and observing a character - and that's what I do with a lot of characters in my books. And then my imagination eats them alive.

I've made movies that were adaptations and I've been kind of frustrated by the process because, you know that old axiom, 'It's never as good as the book'? It's often true because nothing competes with your own imagination. When you're reading a book and you imagine something in your head, nothing's going to compete with that.

There was one moment, and it happened in school. I had a big final exam - we were supposed to write a 20-page report on this book about Houdini. I probably would have loved reading it, but I didn't, so I just decided to make a little super-8 movie based on it. I tied myself to the railroad tracks and all that. I mean, this is kid stuff, but it impressed the teacher, and I got an A. And that was maybe my first turning point, when I said, 'Yeah, I wouldn't mind being a filmmaker.'

I play piano and that's my love. I read and I paint and I compose music, so I've got a pretty full creative life. And it's not because, I'm obsessively creative.

I am not God. But I can only do my role here on this planet. The role I feel I was given since I was a kid was to be making art and I only wanted to give and I never let money be my God.

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

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.

I spent my life in the library reading books.

I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.

Actors want to work. Give them characters they want to play, or a story they want to tell, and hopefully the budget will follow.

Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.

Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.

I've always got a book in my hands, a novel in my hands. The more I get into film, the more paranoid I get that I'm going to stop seeing things.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.