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

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

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Any teammate of mine that had a kid and a boy that was capable of playing baseball, I think I set a terrific example of ‚Don’t do this‘ and ‚Don’t do that.‘ And that’s one of the things that I’m most proud of.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

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.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

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

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

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

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

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.

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.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

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

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.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

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

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‚Wind in the Willows‘ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‚The Wind in the Willows.‘

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

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

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

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

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

I’ve loved reading all my life.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

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

I grew up reading science fiction.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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

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

The book you don’t read won’t help.

Reading isn’t good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn’t hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

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.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.

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.

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.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

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

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘