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.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

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.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

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.

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

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

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.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

I’m always trying. Between every book, I think, ‚Well now, it’s time to get down to the serious stuff.‘

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

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

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

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Leave all the afternoon for exercise and recreation, which are as necessary as reading. I will rather say more necessary because health is worth more than learning.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

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

‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

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

A home without books is a body without soul.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

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

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

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.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

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.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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

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.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

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 shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

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

To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I’ve got books I need to read.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

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.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

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 consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.