I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

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.‘

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

If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

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

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

If music be the food of love, play on.

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

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

I’m always trying. Between every book, I think, ‚Well now, it’s time to get down to the serious stuff.‘

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

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

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

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

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

As for hobbies, I don’t really read or watch TV.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

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.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

A home without books is a body without soul.

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.

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

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Brevity is the soul of wit.