I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

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

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.

I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.

I never needed much, and I never thought I’d get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.

My mom was a great tennis player, and I remember being six or seven years old watching Steffi Graf and Monica Seles in Wimbledon in my house. I’ve always been a tennis fan.

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 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.

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

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.

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

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

I would always want printed books.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

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

In my heart, I’m just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I’m not a rich man.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

I still consider myself a little, fat kid from Hawaii.

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

All my playmates on the farm were black, and later, when I started school in Plains, it was all white. But I was always eager to get back home to my friends in Archery.

Childhood was very nice. The only thing wrong was that I was so introverted, everything became a big deal… ‚Oh, no, here comes the bus. Where am I gonna sit on the bus?‘

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.

When I was little, I used to adore gold. It was something special.

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

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

When I was 8 years old, I saw ‚Raiders of the Lost Ark‘ in Charlotte, North Carolina. I walked out of there and was so inspired. I loved the movie, and I knew I wanted to be that guy.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone’s inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

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

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

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

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.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

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

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

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.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

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.

Since childhood, I’ve been a clown. I’ve always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It’s my original self.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

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

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.

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

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

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

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.

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

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

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

I read a lot when I’m travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

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.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.