“Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.”

“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”

“No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.”

“Well you can't believe everything you read. After all, by definition, fiction writers lie for a living.”

“If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it”

“I never read contemporary fiction – with one exception: the works of Simenon concerned with Inspector Maigret.”

“Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read-ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.”

“I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read…I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.”

“I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.”

“I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen”