Larry Niven Quotes

Read, read, read, read and then read some more.

I'm not comfortable being preachy, but more people need to start spending as much time in the library as they do on the basketball court.

Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.

I wish I had had my books when I was a kid, I do.

I have always advised men to read.

I don't read much, I don't have the time. But I'm not at all happy about that; I want to read more. It's a promise I made to myself. I think it's important.

By the time I was in my teens, I was reading science fiction. I had this maternal uncle who had cartons of books. It's important to read because you have to fill your head with words.

I'm just encouraging students to read. It's something you can do daily. It's something you can do whether you're sitting at home reading a newspaper or ordering something online. It's endless.

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. It is said that leaders are readers. However if they read trashy magazines for the majority of their time and they never run with the information that they glean from resourceful books, then they may as well have not taken any time to read at all. It is easier to stay out than get out.

I never have a problem with being black. I have a problem with the easy association of what that means to some people.

Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.

Reading is a dissuasion from immorality. Reading stands in the place of company.

Reading was such an enrichment of my life. And it was that pleasure that I had as a very young reader probably that is the origin of my vocation.

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.

Samuel Beckett is the person that I read the most of - certainly the person whose books I own the most of. Probably 800 or 900, maybe 1,000 books of just Samuel Beckett. By him, about him, in different languages, etc. etc. Notebooks of his, letters of his that I own, personal letters - not to me, but I bought a bunch of correspondence of his. I love his humor, and I'm always blown away by his syntax and his ideas. So I keep reading those.

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

I was never without a book in my hand.

Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.

If you're black living in the community and you want to change things, there are going to be things that happen. That's true of anybody. I mean you could use celebrity as a similar metaphor.

When I was a kid I ate sports books up, like "Winners Never Quit" by Phil Pepe. That was like my bible.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing!