‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

On ‚Mystic River,‘ I had to cut my salary and everyone else’s to get it made.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

I’m terrible at reading scripts. I love to read, and I hate reading scripts.

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Many admire, few know.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

The best way to resolve any problem in the human world is for all sides to sit down and talk.

The only thing wrong with the NBA – or any other professional sport, for that matter – is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules.

It’s a mystery. That’s the first thing that interests me about the idea of God. If there is one, it’s mysterious and powerful and awesome to even consider the concept, and you have to take it seriously.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‚Thirty days hath September‘ because it actually tells you something.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don’t know.

One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can’t even lift them.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

I don’t read ‚chick lit,‘ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

Crazy players love me. I don’t know why.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

I grew up reading science fiction.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

I cannot live without books.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

Reading isn’t good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn’t hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.