I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

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

I’ve loved reading all my life.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.

It’s been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.

I need more sex, OK? Before I die I wanna taste everyone in the world.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

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

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

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.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

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.

Confidence is always a good thing to have going into the weekend. Especially where it’s quite difficult to put the lap together.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

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

Hillary doesn’t play. She has more experience and exposure to the presidency than any candidate in our lifetime – yes, more than Barack, more than Bill. So she is absolutely ready to be Commander-in-Chief on day one. And, yes, she happens to be a woman.

I’m always reading the next book. Taking notes. Highlighting, researching, studying. It doesn’t stop.

Language is wine upon the lips.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of ‚like‘ has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

If you want to go somewhere, it is best to find someone who has already been there.

If you young fellows were wise, the devil couldn’t do anything to you, but since you aren’t wise, you need us who are old.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.

My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

The reward of suffering is experience.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

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

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

The way I talk is bizarre.

I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there’s a good English phrase for it – cold war.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

The pace at which people are taking to digital technology defies our stereotypes of age, education, language and income.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.