I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

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

I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

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.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.

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

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

I would always want printed books.

I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

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

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

‚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.

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Stay active. Read the Word. Worship with other believers. Continue to give. Keep learning and growing. Your faith will be unleashed!

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

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.

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

Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

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

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

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.

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

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

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

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

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 want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

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

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

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.

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

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.