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

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

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.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‚Wow, that movie‘ – or that show or whatever – ‚turned out really well.‘

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

You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Basketball is my passion, I love it. But my family and friends mean everything to me. That’s what’s important. I need my phone so I can keep in contact with them at all times.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

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

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

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

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

My friends tease me about the fact that if someone seems bad or shady or like they have a secret, I find them incredibly interesting.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

To the man who reads ‚Scouting for Boys‘ superficially, there is a disappointing lack of religion in the book. But to him who tries it in practice, the basic religion underlying it soon becomes apparent.

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.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

My friends ask me if I want more kids, and I always say yes, I want more; it’s the best thing you can have in your life.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

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

I have a lot of friends who do what I do. Either they’re actresses or singers or things like that.

The events that I have attended to mark my Diamond Jubilee have been a humbling experience. It has touched me deeply to see so many thousands of families, neighbors and friends celebrating together in such a happy atmosphere.

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

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

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

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

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 try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

The people you choose to have around you make all the difference. My family and close friends keep me grounded. You have to have a mind of your own and a strong head on your shoulders. Cricket is the most important thing to me, so the rest of it pales in comparison.

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.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

If it’s good music, it’s good music.

The kindness that’s been shown to me, by doctors as well as my family and my friends, it’s really saved my life.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

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

The only way I hear gossip is if it’s big enough and loud enough for my friends to bring it up to me. Or if it’s, like, a big untrue ordeal from my publicist – and she hates making that phone call!

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

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

My mother insisted that her children read.

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

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

I was performing in New York and my friends started to call me Gaga, they said I was very theatrical and they said, ‚You’re Gaga‘.

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

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

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 was a very keen reader of science fiction.

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