If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

I don’t call myself a Buddhist. I’m a free spirit. I believe I’m here on earth to admire and enjoy it; that’s my religion.

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.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

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

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

I like to have fun all the time, even if I’m working.

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.

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

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

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

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

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

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

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

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

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.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

I had a good time boxing. I enjoyed it – and I may come back.

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.

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

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

By reading, you learn through others‘ experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

I specifically did not read other First Ladies‘ books, because I didn’t want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role – very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Living big and joyful and content is almost always the result of our finding satisfaction in life’s ordinary day-to-day pleasures. And God must be fond of them, too, for He made so many of them for us to enjoy.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

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

I am a part of everything that I have read.

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.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

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

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

If it’s good music, it’s good music.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.