Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s – the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.

I love tango, and I used to dance when I was young.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

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

I remember the first time I had sex – I kept the receipt.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

I was 14, and I fell in love with Pink Floyd.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go… It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, ‚Wait a second? Didn’t we just get through with that?‘

Akron, Ohio, is my home. It will always be remembered. Akron, Ohio, is my life.

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.

What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy’s tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes.

I’m from the generation that had the boys‘ door and the girls‘ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

I can’t remember what made my dad take us karting for the first time, I can’t remember really. I was into motorsport by then and I knew everything, and every driver, it was around 2009, 2008. That’s when I first properly knew about Formula One. Those were the days.

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.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

There are so many memories for me in Manchester. Everywhere I go, I think, ‚I used to have boutiques here, clubs there, restaurants in that area.‘

My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do.

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.

Christmas morning, I’m going to open presents with my kids. I’m going to take pictures of them opening the presents. Then I’m going to come to the Staples Center and get ready to work.

I remember I used to sleep on my records. In a room with no furniture. I remember I used to sleep in my car.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

To me, my house is always recreating what I lost in youth.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink – boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

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

This is a moment that I deeply wish my parents could have lived to share. My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously said of me-and my mother would have believed it.

I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.

My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

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

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

Libraries raised me.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

Upon the farm of the uncle with whom I lived, we did know of the mortgage as some dreadful damper on youthful hopes of things that could not be bought. I do have a vivid recollection that the major purpose of a farm was to produce a living right on the spot for the family.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

In fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.

In this bright future you can’t forget your past.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

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.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.