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

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

The U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name.

A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples‘ money.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

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

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

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

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

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

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

To restore the trust of the people, we must reform the way the government operates.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

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.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

I have been very happy in the House of Representatives.

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.

What do you think a stimulus is? It’s spending – that’s the whole point! Seriously.

We can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

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.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I’m always trying. Between every book, I think, ‚Well now, it’s time to get down to the serious stuff.‘

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

That government is best which governs least.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I am often asked if, when I was secretary, I had problems with foreign men. That is not who I had problems with, because I arrived in a very large plane that said United States of America. I had more problems with the men in our own government.

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.

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

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.

About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.

Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

I love being in the United States Senate.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.