Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

I now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it’s like therapy for me.

I love stories about women.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

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

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

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

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‚Wind in the Willows‘ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‚The Wind in the Willows.‘

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

I grew up reading science fiction.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

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

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

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

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

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

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

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.

I am confident that nobody… will accuse me of selfishness if I ask to spend time, while I am still in good health, with my family, my friends and also with myself.

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.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

I spend a lot of time reading.

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

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.

I don’t read ‚chick lit,‘ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.

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

The first thing I look forward to when I am in Delhi is to spend some time with my family. It’s always lovely coming back here and playing in front of my own people. It’s just a special place.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

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

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I don’t listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It’s all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You’d have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music – I couldn’t sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.

My shows are not narratives.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

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

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.

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

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

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.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‚Man of Tai Chi‘ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.

The influence of ‚Hidden Fortress‘ comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.

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.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

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

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.