I read poetry to save time.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

When I was 10 years old, I loved – I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

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.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

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

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

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

I have a little bit of that gamer spirit in me. I just don’t have the time to be a gamer. But in another life, I would be one.

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.

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.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

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

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

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

When I am playing baseball, I give it all that I have on the ball field. When the ball game is over, I certainly don’t take it home. My little girl who is sitting out there wouldn’t know the difference between a third strike and a foul ball. We don’t talk about baseball at home.

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.

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

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

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.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

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

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

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

I think everybody has something that they’ve been obsessed about in their lifetime.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

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.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

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

Don’t just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

The proper study of mankind is books.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

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

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!

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

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

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.