I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

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

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

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

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

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

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.

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

‚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.

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

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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

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.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

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.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

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

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.

I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

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

I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

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

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

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.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

I spend a lot of time reading.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

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.‘

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

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.‘

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.