If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

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.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

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 poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

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.‘

Each doctor makes a much, much more important job than I do, but at the end, nobody talks about him. We all know about it, but we don’t really think about it.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

All you have in business is your reputation – so it’s very important that you keep your word.

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

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

We get paid for bringing value to the market place.

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

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

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.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

Gold was a gift to Jesus. If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.

Politeness is, you know, is a wonderful thing. Manners are in fact, really important thing. But remember, Jesus didn’t have many manners as we now know.

My share of the work may be limited, but the fact that it is work makes it precious.

The product of mental labor – science – always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

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

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.

If you think dealing with issues like worthiness and authenticity and vulnerability are not worthwhile because there are more pressing issues, like the bottom line or attendance or standardized test scores, you are sadly, sadly mistaken. It underpins everything.

I spend a lot of time reading.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‚Well, yeah,‘ but you start to think, ‚Why not, though?‘ What makes one more valuable than another?

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.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

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.

We should seek the greatest value of our action.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

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

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

I don’t care how busy I am – I will always make time for what’s most important to me.

I’ve just always been a reader.

It’s very difficult to read a book on your computer.

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

I have always reckoned the dignity of the republic of first importance and preferable to life.

Without football, my life is worth nothing.

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same things as Men did. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered.

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

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.