I love books.
I read while the kids play. I can see them from the kitchen window. And I’m a fast reader.
I got a role in this movie called Freeway playing this really angry, aggressive, violent young woman who believed wholeheartedly in the truth. I had such satisfaction afterward, and I thought, That’s what I want to do.
I grew up in Tennessee. We didn’t know what Louis Vuitton was. I had to order all my prom outfits out of catalogs.
Being a Southern person and a blonde, it’s not a good combination. Immediately, when people meet you, they think of you as not being smart.
That said, my kids are at home right now with my husband and I’m missing something important at my daughter’s school which makes me feel sick inside. It’s a lot of balance and a lot of really hard decision making.
Even people that know Johnny Cash’s music really well and know that he was married don’t really know that much about June Carter. So finding out about her really helped to inform my performance and to bring her to the front in a way that she has never been before.
I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
An autobiography is not about pictures; it’s about the stories; it’s about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people’s privacy.
What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
As a child I used to read Gone with the Wind over and over again. I wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara. I never wanted to believe that it was possible that there could be infidelity. I never wanted to be believe that it was even possible for a man to look another way, even for a moment. My bubble of monogamy was pierced in a harsh way.
When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.
A multitude of books distracts the mind.
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.
If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.
