Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

The first quality that is needed is audacity.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

I read poetry to save time.

It is not so much our friends‘ help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

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.

Books are sharks… because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

What is easy is seldom excellent.

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

Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.

I feel only my friends and family need to know what is happening in my personal life.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

My most important projects have been the building and maintaining of schools and medical clinics for my dear friends in the Himalaya and helping restore their beautiful monasteries, too.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

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.

I never enjoyed school and I was never that good at school so leaving wasn’t the biggest thing, but the social aspect of school, leaving your friends, you lose contact with them a bit and now I have more friends at the race track than the friends I keep in touch with at school.

Sometimes I write about my own life. And sometimes I write about situations I see my friends going through. Sometimes I write about a scene I saw in a movie. I take inspiration from all different places.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

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.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

I had not expected ‚A Brief History of Time‘ to be a best seller.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

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.

The proper study of mankind is books.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by my friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance.

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

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

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

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.

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

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

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

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

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

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

To understand the true quality of people, you must look into their minds, and examine their pursuits and aversions.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

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

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.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them.

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

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

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.