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?

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.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

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

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

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

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

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

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

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

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

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

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

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

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

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

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.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

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

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

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

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

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

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

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

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.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

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

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 are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

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.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

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

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

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.

I’ve just always been a reader.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

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

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.

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

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

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.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.