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

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

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

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

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

I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

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

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

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

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

What we anticipate seldom occurs: but what we least expect generally happens.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the book.

For me, when you are have people wondering what is next, what is coming out, you are on the right track.

I read to my kid, but I can’t stand reading.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

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

In the book of Gaga, fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

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.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can’t even lift them.

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

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

I know a dramatic role is going to happen, but you just got to be patient, you know? It’s going to happen when it’s supposed to happen. I’m not rushing it. I’m not trying to make it happen tomorrow.

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

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Certainly I’m not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I’m a sponge. I’ve always been a sponge.

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

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

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

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

It’s a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

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.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

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

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.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

A home without books is a body without soul.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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.

I specifically did not read other First Ladies‘ books, because I didn’t want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role – very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.

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

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.