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.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

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

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

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

I was ironing my own clothes when I was 11 years old. My mental strength goes back to those days.

Well, everyone likes movies when they’re a little kid.

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

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

Whenever something went wrong when I was young – if I had a pimple or if my hair broke – my mom would say, ‚Sister mine, I’m going to make you some soup.‘ And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.

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

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.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

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

I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.

I was called ‚Dumbo,‘ like the elephant, as a child because I couldn’t understand things at school.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

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

I’ve just always been a reader.

My mother loved children – she would have given anything if I had been one.

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

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.

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

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

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

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.

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

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

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

In the real world, children love me.

Sadly, I do my homework. I’ve a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I’ll read C. Fred Bergsten’s defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It’s embarrassing to admit.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

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.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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.

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

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

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

I try to read as much as I can. I try to read an informative article every day. I try to stay read up on our world issues.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.