I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

I grew up reading science fiction.

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

I have worked hard since my childhood and worked as a labourer. I put my mind and heart into it.

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.

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.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‚Read,‘ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‚Don’t read, don’t think, just write,‘ and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

I’ve always felt heroic about my life… As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn’t think that was the case at all. My parents didn’t treat me as a girl.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

I cannot live without books.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

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

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

When I was growing up, I wasn’t an extrovert. If anything, I was an introverted kid and a very average pupil at school. I was very quiet.

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 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.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I’m in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times.

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years.

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

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

If I could have worked from the time I was born until I was 18 and never had to work again, I would have done it.

In the real world, children love me.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

But ever since I was a kid, I was always the winner.

I used to live with my grandmother. I used to wonder why the other kids in school went home with their mothers and fathers. I wanted to be the guy that got married. I wanted to be the guy with the children and the white picket fence. I never had that.

If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

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

A home without books is a body without soul.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

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.

It’s always a struggle growing up in Akron.

I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

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.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

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

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

When I was 5, some financial things happened, and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say, ‚Don’t get comfortable, because we may not be here long.‘

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

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