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

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Love possesses not nor will it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love.

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.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I grew up reading science fiction.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

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

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

On the subject of literary genres, I’ve always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I’d love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

Weather forecast for tonight: dark.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

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

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.