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

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. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.

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 know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

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

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

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

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

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

You cannot open a book without learning something.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

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

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

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.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

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

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

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

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

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.

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.

When I was 10 years old, I loved – I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

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.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

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

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

I’m always trying. Between every book, I think, ‚Well now, it’s time to get down to the serious stuff.‘

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.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

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

I don’t believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

I like to read books. I like to listen to music.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

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

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

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

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.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

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

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

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

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.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

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.

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

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

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

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.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

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

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.