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 good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

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.

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.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

A home without books is a body without soul.

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

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

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

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

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

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

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

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

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

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

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.

Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring… ‚How to Build a Boat.‘

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

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

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.

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.

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.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

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.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

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.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

The Bible says today is the accepted time, today is the day of salvation… But there will come a time when it will be too late for you.

I don’t have freedom in the United States to go into a public school and preach the Gospel, nor is a student free in a public school to pray, or a teacher free to read the Bible publicly to the students. At the same time, we have a great degree of freedom for which I am grateful.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

I read to my kid, but I can’t stand reading.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

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 book worth reading is worth buying.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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

The proper study of mankind is books.

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

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

A lot of psychological principles and even medical principles, you see them coming around to what the Bible said hundreds of years ago: a merry heart is good like a medicine.

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.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

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.

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