‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

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

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.

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.

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

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

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

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

As for hobbies, I don’t really read or watch TV.

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.

London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don’t know.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

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.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

I don’t read books much.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

Stay active. Read the Word. Worship with other believers. Continue to give. Keep learning and growing. Your faith will be unleashed!

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

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

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.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

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

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

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

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

The Bermuda Triangle got tired of warm weather. It moved to Alaska. Now Santa Claus is missing.

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?

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

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

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

I did this book ‚Harvest for Hope,‘ and I learned so much about food. And one thing I learned is that we have the guts not of a carnivore, but of an herbivore. Herbivore guts are very long because they have to get the last bit of nutrition out of leaves and things.

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.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

So, I’m lying on the couch and Laura walks in and I say, ‚Free at last,‘ and she says ‚You’re free all right, you’re free to do the dishes.‘ So I say, ‚You’re talking to the former president, baby,‘ and she said, ‚consider this your new domestic policy agenda.‘

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

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’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

‚Eastern Promises‘ is great.