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

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

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

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.

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.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

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

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

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

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

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

A home without books is a body without soul.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That’s one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

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.

Nobody likes to have trouble. The moment we get a hint that it’s coming, a common response is, ‚Oh no! Not again!‘

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

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

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

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

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

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.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

By reading, you learn through others‘ experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

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

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.

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

I grew up reading science fiction.

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.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

I wasn’t a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn’t written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours – and I think probably gave me many nightmares.

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.

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

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.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

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

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