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

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’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

As for hobbies, I don’t really read or watch TV.

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

There are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not 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.

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.

I read a lot when I’m travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

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

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

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

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

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.

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

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

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

I read poetry to save time.

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

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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

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

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

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

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 bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.

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 never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

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 read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

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

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

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.

I love to put on lotion. Sometimes I’ll watch TV and go into a lotion trance for an hour. I try to find brands that don’t taste bad in case anyone wants to taste me.

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

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

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.

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’m really interested in smells. I think I’d like to own a perfumery someday.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.