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

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

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

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

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

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.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

I read to my kid, but I can’t stand reading.

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.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

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.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

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

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

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.

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

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.

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

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

U2 is an original species… there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

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

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about 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.‘

I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

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.

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

I cannot live without books.

I always liked different things, rare things.

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

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

The fact that over 50 per cent of the residents of Toronto are not from Canada, that is always a good thing, creatively, and for food especially. That is easily a city’s biggest strength, and it is Toronto’s unique strength.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

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.

Sadly, I do my homework. I’ve a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I’ll read C. Fred Bergsten’s defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It’s embarrassing to admit.

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.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

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

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

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.

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

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

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

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.