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

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 don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

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.

The only big things I’ve purchased are my dad’s heart valve and a Rolls-Royce for my parents, for their anniversary. And that was only because my dad had a Lady Gaga license plate on our old car and it was making me crazy because he was getting followed everywhere, so I bought him a new car.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

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

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

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

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

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.

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

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.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‚Star Trek.‘ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

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

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

I read poetry to save time.

It’s a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‚Read,‘ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‚Don’t read, don’t think, just write,‘ and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

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

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

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.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

The book you don’t read won’t help.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

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

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

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.

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

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

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

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

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

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

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

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

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

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

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?

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

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