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

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

As for hobbies, I don’t really read or watch TV.

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.

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.

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

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

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.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

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

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.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

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

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

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.

I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

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

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

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

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

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

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

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

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.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

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.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

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

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

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

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.

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.

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.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

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

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

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

I’m not a nerd, don’t plan to be a nerd and read books – which I can’t do at all.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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

The book you don’t read won’t help.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

I spend a lot of time reading.