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.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

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.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

I don’t read books much.

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

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

Ambition never is in a greater hurry than I; it merely keeps pace with circumstances and with my general way of thinking.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

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.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

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

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

I’m not a nerd, don’t plan to be a nerd and read books – which I can’t do at all.

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.

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

A lot of stuff I do out of pure obsessiveness.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

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

I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

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

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

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.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

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

I’ve never wanted to use my age as a gimmick, as something that would get me ahead of other people. I’ve wanted the music to do that.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

I do a little thing about the way people shake the sweetener packet. You know, like they’re all excited. I want to get all the granules down to one end. I love all these rituals.

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

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

I am not a fan of books.

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

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

I never drink coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon.

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.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

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

It’s very difficult to read a book on your computer.