Top 100 Gary Paulsen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Read like a wolf eats.”

— Gary Paulsen

2. “A book is a friend. You can never have too many.”

— Gary Paulsen

3. “There is always a solution. For everything. Always. Sometimes it isn’t pretty and takes a little longer, but there is still a solution.”

— Gary Paulsen

4. “If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.”

— Gary Paulsen

5. “I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.”

— Gary Paulsen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

6. “Do what you can as you can. Trouble, problems, will come no matter what you do, and you must respond as they come.”

— Gary Paulsen

7. “It was as though I had been dying of thirst and the librarian had handed me a five gallon bucket of water. I drank and drank. The only reason I am here and not in prison is because of that woman. I was a loser, but she showed me the power of reading.”

— Gary Paulsen

Featured in: Reading Quotes

8. “Stories are like a river that flows – you dip a bucket in it.”

— Gary Paulsen

9. “That’s all it took to solve problems – just sense.”

— Gary Paulsen

10. “Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience – waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.”

— Gary Paulsen

11. “And the last thought he had that morning as he closed his eyes was: I hope the tornado hit the moose.”

— Gary Paulsen

12. “The hatchet. The key to it all. Nothing without the hatchet. Just that would take all his thanks. And.”

— Gary Paulsen

13. “When he sat alone in the darkness and cried and was done, all done with it, nothing had changed. His leg still hurt, it was still dark, he was still alone and the self-pity had accomplished nothing.”

— Gary Paulsen

14. “I read like a wolf eats. I read myself to sleep every night.”

— Gary Paulsen

15. “Things seemed to go back and forth between reality and imagination – except that it was all reality.”

— Gary Paulsen

16. “Running with dogs is like dancing with winter.”

— Gary Paulsen

17. “Personal inspection at zero altitude. The stories come from my life – if not my own experiences, then about topics and subjects that interest me.”

— Gary Paulsen

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

18. “You want to stay hungry... to learn. You get full, you get sleepy, lazy; you get lazy, you don’t learn.”

— Gary Paulsen

19. “Books make me feel safe. Books make me feel normal.”

— Gary Paulsen

20. “Adults are locked into car payments and divorces and work. They haven’t got time to think fresh.”

— Gary Paulsen

21. “We make a mistake in thinking we own pets – the animals open their lives up and make us a part of them.”

— Gary Paulsen

22. “Name the book that made the biggest impression on you. I bet you read it before you hit puberty. In the time I’ve got left, I intend to write artistic books – for kids – because they’re still open to new ideas.”

— Gary Paulsen

23. “But life has a way of pulling the rug out from under you just when you need it least, which is what they like to call growing, I guess, but as far as I’m concerned you can have it. It seems like everything they call growing up has to jerk your guts out and just about wreck you and I’ve never been able to understand why that’s supposed to be good for you.”

— Gary Paulsen

24. “Never assume anything, expect the unexpected, be ready for everything all the time. And.”

— Gary Paulsen

25. “Initially, he worried that he might be going crazy. But then he decided if you felt you were crazy you weren’t really crazy because he had heard somewhere that crazy people didn’t know they were insane.”

— Gary Paulsen

26. “Brian had once had an English teacher, a guy named Perpich, who was always talking about being positive, thinking positive, staying on top of things.”

— Gary Paulsen

27. “The memory was like a knife cutting into him. Slicing deep into him with hate.”

— Gary Paulsen

28. “I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me. The sea.”

— Gary Paulsen

29. “You never beat the game... You go in, take what you need, get out. Never stay too long and never, never try to whip the game. Stay there too long and they figure you out, start chewing at the corners on you, know your betting. Then maybe two, three of them get together and whipsaw you.”

— Gary Paulsen

30. “Change is good, but sometimes leaving things the way they’ve always been is better.”

— Gary Paulsen

31. “I am full of tough hope.”

— Gary Paulsen

32. “For those of you who wish to get a feel for it, get in the car and bring it up to fifty miles an hour and then stick your head and arms outside and, while driving, try to fold up a simple bath towel in the wind.”

— Gary Paulsen

33. “He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping.”

— Gary Paulsen

34. “The person who reads can bail, but the person who doesn’t fails.”

— Gary Paulsen

35. “He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn’t work.”

— Gary Paulsen

36. “It’s just that those things don’t seem to have the weight, the measureless beauty of countless sunsets and dawns, the simple grace and clear glory of nature.”

— Gary Paulsen

37. “School didn’t work for me. I hated it.”

— Gary Paulsen

38. “The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated – it’s all bad.”

— Gary Paulsen

39. “Simple. Keep it simple. I am Brian Robeson. I have been in a plane crash. I am going to find some food. I am going to find some berries. He.”

— Gary Paulsen

40. “He could not play the game without hope; could not play the game without a dream. They had taken it all away from him now, they had turned away from him and there was nothing for him now. The plane gone, his family gone, all of it gone. They would not come. He was alone and there was nothing for him.”

— Gary Paulsen

41. “My name is Brian Robeson and I am thirteen years old and I am alone in the north woods of Canada. All.”

— Gary Paulsen

42. “If you keep walking back from good luck, he thought, you’ll come to bad luck.”

— Gary Paulsen

43. “The burning eyes did not come back, but memories did, came flooding in. The words. Always the words. Divorce.”

— Gary Paulsen

44. “He was not the same. The plane passing changed him, the disappointment cut him down and made him new. He was not the same and would never be again like he had been. That was one of the true things, the new things. And the other one was that he would not die, he would not let death in again.”

— Gary Paulsen

45. “None of that used to be in Brian and now it was a part of him, a changed part of him, a grown part of him, and the two things, his mind and his body, had come together as well, had made a connection with each other that he didn’t quite understand.”

— Gary Paulsen

46. “In measured time forty-seven days had passed since the crash. Forty-two days, he thought, since he had died and been born as the new Brian. When the plane had come and gone it had put him down, gutted him and dropped him and left him with nothing.”

— Gary Paulsen

47. “The book is that is the good one is Woodsong and we are trying to finish it.”

— Gary Paulsen

48. “But perhaps more than his body was the change in his mind, or in the way he was – was becoming. I am not the same, he thought. I see, I hear differently.”

— Gary Paulsen

49. “In a real situation, like when I was here before, there were things wrong – going wrong. The plane didn’t land and set me on the shore. It crashed. A man was dead. I was hurt. I didn’t know anything. Nothing at all. I was, maybe, close to death and now we’re out here going la-de-da, I’ve got a fish; la-de-da, there are some more berries.”

— Gary Paulsen

50. “But the beauty of the woods, the incredible joy of it is too alluring to be ignored, and I could not stand to be away from it – indeed, still can’t – and so I ran dogs simply to run dogs; to be in and part of the forest, the woods.”

— Gary Paulsen