My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

I have more friends in New York than Paris.

Littera scripta manet – ‚The written word will remain‘. That’s true, but it won’t be that much comfort to me.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha’am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha’am’s essays.

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.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

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

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

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

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

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

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Video is growing very quickly on Facebook. A lot of people compare that to YouTube. I think that kind of makes sense. YouTube isn’t the only video service, but I think it’s the biggest, and it probably makes more sense to compare Facebook video to YouTube rather than Netflix because that’s a completely different kind of content.

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

My life is not unlike Truman’s. I can’t go anywhere.

Neither should a ship rely on one small anchor, nor should life rest on a single hope.

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?

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Water is my drink.

Music is like film to me.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

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

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.

I read poetry to save time.

I am not a fan of books.

Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

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

Reality is a sliding door.

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

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‚Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.‘

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.