“I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”

“Never read any book that is not a year old.”

“School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn't want to learn.”

“I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.”

“All I knew was that I’d flunked the third grade twice because I couldn’t learn to read, had a terrible time all through grammar school and high school. Then after ten years of writing, I was finally able to sell my first book to a leading mass-market paperback publisher in New York.”

“Youth is learning to read (which is all that one learns in school), and is learning where and how to find what he may later need to know (which is the best of the arts that he acquires in college). Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.”

“I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book… I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it.”

“Learning is not by going to school, books is not by reading; but knowing what you went their for and understanding what you've read in those books.”

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”

“I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”