Thomas Carlyle Quotes

I'm sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I've had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Libraries can take the place of God.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.

Books come from within.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

I don't go around thinking I'm Ray Bradbury all the time.

Books guided my life from high school, and the greatest, most interesting, most provocative, funniest, smartest people who ever lived in the last 200 or 300 years wrote those books. I would fall in love with Victor Hugo and read not just 'Les Miserables,' but 'Bug-Jargal' and 'The Toilers of the Sea' and so forth.

Read everything! I believe that reading made me a writer.

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

Books still accomplish miracles; they persuade men.

All my big heroes are literary, writers.

I think you can always learn lessons by the guys who came before you.

The pen and the written word hold a great deal of power.

Anyone who has been successful and has knowledge to share is a potential mentor.

I adore Toni Morrison. I think we would all be better writers if we read more of her.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.