From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.

Where I grew up – I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights – that’s every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don’t want your kids to hear growing up.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.

My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God – I thank God every time I think of it – I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.

I come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

I didn’t play with other children.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.

I learned early to drink beer, wine and whiskey. And I think I was about 5 when I first chewed tobacco.

I learned to walk as a baby, and I haven’t had a lesson since.

I would always want printed books.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind.

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

I’m terrible at reading scripts. I love to read, and I hate reading scripts.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.