I would always want printed books.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

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

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

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

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

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

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

I read to my kid, but I can’t stand reading.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

I read poetry to save time.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

I am not a fan of books.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

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.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

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

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

I cannot live without books.

Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can’t even lift them.

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

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

I grew up reading science fiction.

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

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

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

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.

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

By reading, you learn through others‘ experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.