When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

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

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

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.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

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

When I die, I’m gonna leave my body to science fiction.

My mother insisted that her children read.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

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?

I’m terrible at reading scripts. I love to read, and I hate reading scripts.

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

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

I am a child but I have to think and act like a woman, this business forces you to.

I like Aurora, ‚Sleeping Beauty,‘ because she’s just sleeping and looking pretty and waiting for boys to come kiss her. Sounds like a good life – lots of naps and cute boys fighting dragons to come kiss you.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

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

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.

I read ‚The High Frontier‘ in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, ‚Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.‘

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

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

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 grew up in a funny way.

From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

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

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on on the outside!

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.

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.

Where I grew up – I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights – that’s every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don’t want your kids to hear growing up.

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

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

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.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I’m going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I’m going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

My parents weren’t actors or studio executives.

I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

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

If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.

Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

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

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

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

Green Eggs and Ham was the story of my life. I wouldn’t eat a thing when I was a kid, but Dr. Seuss inspired me to try cauliflower!

If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we’re ever likely to do that is by going into space.

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.