There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

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 maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

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

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

Don’t just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

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

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

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.

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

I’ve only wanted paper and beautiful colors. It was my dream, and it still is my dream. And books. They’re all I need, and the rest I can do without.

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!

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

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.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

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

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

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

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

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

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

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

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

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

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

I read a lot when I’m travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

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.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, ‚The Martian Chronicles.‘

I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I’m in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

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

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

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

I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

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

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

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

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.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

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