The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

A lot of Jews are great friends of mine.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.

The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Electrical science has revealed to us the true nature of light, has provided us with innumerable appliances and instruments of precision, and has thereby vastly added to the exactness of our knowledge.

I read poetry to save time.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Women have to be active listeners and interrupters – but when you interrupt, you have to know what you are talking about.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

Ultimately, education in its real sense is the pursuit of truth. It is an endless journey through knowledge and enlightenment.

All knowledge or form conception is evoked through the medium of the eye, either in response to disturbances directly received on the retina or to their fainter secondary effects and reverberations. Other sense organs can only call forth feelings which have no reality of existence and of which no conception can be formed.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

I’ve always wanted male friends that I could be real intimate with and talk about important things with and be as affectionate with that person as I would be with a girl.

Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

The learned is happy, nature to explore; The fool is happy, that he knows no more.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Reading isn’t good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn’t hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

Trust is hard to come by. That’s why my circle is small and tight. I’m kind of funny about making new friends.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

I’m cool with Jay-Z. Jay-Z is genuinely my friend.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.