Writing and reading variables to/from flat file

[Kevin Walzer]

I want to write some variables (user preferences, specifically) to a
text file and then read the values from that file.

Here is my code to write the data:

verbosemodes= """
    Detailed = "-vv"
    Basic = "-q"
    """

file = open('prefs', 'w')

file.writelines(verbosemodes)

file.close()

And here is my code, in a separate module, to read the file and display
the variable values:

readfile = open('prefs').readlines()

for line in readfile:
	print line

print Basic


Running the second module yields this error:

    Detailed = "-vv"

    Basic = "-q"


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "readprefs.py", line 6, in <module>
    print Basic
NameError: name 'Basic' is not defined

Clearly the data is getting read (the lines are being printed), but the
variable itself ("Basic") is not being initialized properly. I'm not
sure what I'm doing wrong here--can anyone point me in the right
direction?  Thanks.

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com