“I went to college, but I learned to write by reading and writing.”

“I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.”

“I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.”

“I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.”

“I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write”

“It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself. Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully written.”

“Read history. That’s it. Read history. Read and read and read in both primary and secondary sources. Learn to evaluate and compare. And then… write. Writing will be the hardest thing you ever do. But it’s the goal— write about the past and how we see it.”

“I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have. It's the only way of learning how to write a story.”

“We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.”

“I learned to write reading North American literature, I love your literature, but I have this feeling that if a country only reads its own literature, it will run out of oxygen.”