I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

It’s very difficult to read a book on your computer.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

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

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

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.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

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.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

My mother insisted that her children read.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

I am deeply grateful to the citizens of Sarajevo and the Sarajevo Canton assembly for bestowing upon me this incredible honor of citizenship. I am so proud to now be a part of such an extraordinary part of the world and fellow citizen to the people I deeply love and admire.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

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

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

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.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.

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

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

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

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

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.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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

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.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

I don’t read ‚chick lit,‘ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.

Certainly I’m not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I’m a sponge. I’ve always been a sponge.

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‚Star Trek.‘ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

‚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.

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.

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