I’m always reading the next book. Taking notes. Highlighting, researching, studying. It doesn’t stop.

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

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

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.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.

I think the reason I don’t read is because, when I’m reading, I feel like I’m missing out on something else. You know, What are my friends doing? Where’s my girlfriend?

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

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.‘

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

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

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

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the book.

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.

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

I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.

I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.

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

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‚Star Trek.‘ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

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 can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

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.

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

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

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.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

Libraries raised me.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

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.

Certainly I’m not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I’m a sponge. I’ve always been a sponge.

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

To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading.