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.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

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.

Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn’t like it, it is it.

One thing about ‚Star Wars‘ that I’m really proud of is that it expands the imagination. That’s why I like the ‚Star Wars‘ toys.

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child… eventually.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

I think the reason I don’t read is because, when I’m reading, I feel like I’m missing out on something else. You know, What are my friends doing? Where’s my girlfriend?

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.

To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading.

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.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

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.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

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.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

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.

My cash cows, the slick magazines, were put out of business by TV.

When I was a kid, I had a tendency to criticize. But when I did, my mum would whisk me off to the bathroom to stand in front of a mirror. Ten minutes, never less. To think about how criticism is a poor reflection on the one who criticizes.

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

When I was at school, I used to stay on a balcony singing and people would stand around listening.

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 cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It’s like my friend, almost.

Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.

It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands. I had posters on my wall. I had Beatles records.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone’s inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer’s disease where they slowly began to recover other people’s lost memories.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

I try to read as much as I can. I try to read an informative article every day. I try to stay read up on our world issues.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

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

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

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.

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

I don’t read books much.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

I can make something magical and wonderful out of nothing.

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.