Reading is very important. It can ignite your imagination, spark joy, and give you solace and perspective; It can also empower you, and help you amass knowledge; Reading can reshape you and teach you what you should believe in.
President Obama once gave an interview on “What Books Mean to Him”. He said books are the “worlds that were portable, that were yours, that you could enter into….”.
I have a passion for reading. Reading is my daily food. I particularly like to read biographies and nonfiction books. I think those books are about real people and real life. You can easily relate to them. And they are written history. Now and then I started to read some great literature. I came to realize that great literature, although they are fiction, are larger than life. They have every exaggerating or predicting descriptions on human natures and human psychology.
Writing, on the other hand, is one level higher of intellectual ability. If reading is to fill knowledge into your perspective reservoir, writing is to let it out poetically, emotionally and logically. Writing is your storytelling and your reflection on things, human and the world at large. Writing is hard, especially if you write in a foreign language. For me, most time when I write something like blogs, words are like scattering pieces of puzzle on my table, it’s very hard to put them together.
Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner once famously said that anyone who wants to be a writer should be a reader first: “Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!”. J.K. Rowling also said that “You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader.” She also posted some tips about writing on her website. Although her advices are for writers, they are good advices for people who love to write too. Rowling listed the various qualities a writer needs to have — discipline, resilience, humility, courage and independence. I think if you don’t have these qualities as a person, how can you give some inspiration to others in your writing?
For me, reading is a leap to the joy, while writing is the joy of solving of puzzle of words, emotions, wits and logics.
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