I am not a fan of books.

Don’t just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

I love great journalism. I appreciate it. I love a good, you know, I love good news stories. I love great books. I love great articles. I appreciate them so much, and they’ve been part of my education as a woman.

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.

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.

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

What’s fascinating is, people in Washington would rather spend time in Hollywood, and people in Hollywood would rather spend time in Washington.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

I think the reason I don’t read is because, when I’m reading, I feel like I’m missing out on something else. You know, What are my friends doing? Where’s my girlfriend?

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

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

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.

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

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

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.

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 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.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

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

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

I’ve never eaten a strawberry in my life. I have no desire to do that.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

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.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

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

I think that most of us would prefer to be popular than unpopular.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

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.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

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.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

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

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

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

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

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

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

I don’t see that my majority opinions are going to be undone.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours – and I think probably gave me many nightmares.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.