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

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

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

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

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

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

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

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

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

I’ve just always been a reader.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

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.

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

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

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

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

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.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.

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.

Jackie Chan is a myth.

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

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

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

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another.

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.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

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

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

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

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

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

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

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.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

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

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

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

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

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.

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

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.

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

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

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

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

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.‘

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.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.