I don’t read books much.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

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.

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.

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.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

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

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

To the man who reads ‚Scouting for Boys‘ superficially, there is a disappointing lack of religion in the book. But to him who tries it in practice, the basic religion underlying it soon becomes apparent.

I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

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.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

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.

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that’s going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

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

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.

I would always want printed books.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

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

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

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

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

You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.

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?

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.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

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

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

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

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

The book you don’t read won’t help.

To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I’ve got books I need to read.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

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

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.

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

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

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

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

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

In the book of Gaga, fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.

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.

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