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

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

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

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

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

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

I would always want printed books.

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.

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

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

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

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

I grew up reading science fiction.

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.

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.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

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.

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

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

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

Electronic books are junk.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

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

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

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

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

I cannot live without books.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring… ‚How to Build a Boat.‘

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

I’m an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

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

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

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.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.