I still have my unemployment books and I remember when I worked for the sanitation department and the post office.

Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s – the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

When I was younger, I used to have more flair, I used to do more tricks, the nutmegs, the step-overs.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

One whose knowledge is confined to books and whose wealth is in the possession of others, can use neither his knowledge nor wealth when the need for them arises.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

In this bright future you can’t forget your past.

My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

Akron, Ohio, is my home. It will always be remembered. Akron, Ohio, is my life.

Before I was famous, when I was just working in Gilbert’s Lodge, everything was moving in slow motion.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

I was 14, and I fell in love with Pink Floyd.

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.

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

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.

In the middle of a recession, where we’re just climbing out of it, where the economy -unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office – anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.

We Conservatives hate unemployment.

There are so many memories for me in Manchester. Everywhere I go, I think, ‚I used to have boutiques here, clubs there, restaurants in that area.‘

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

I specifically did not read other First Ladies‘ books, because I didn’t want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role – very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

I cannot live without books.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

I don’t read books much.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

The nice thing is that when people come up to me, it’s the football they remember, not all the other rubbish.

My parents were divorced by the time I was even conscious – like, I don’t remember them ever being together.

A home without books is a body without soul.

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

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

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.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

I’m from the generation that had the boys‘ door and the girls‘ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

It’s a big compliment that so many people want to see me. For them, it’s all about football. That’s what they remember about me.

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

I can only say the first thing that pops into my mind is I remember, years ago, seeing kind of a has-been country singer working – when I first moved to Nashville – in a bar in a Holiday Inn.

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