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

Love possesses not nor will it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love.

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?

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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.

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

I am not a fan of books.

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.

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

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I grew up reading science fiction.

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

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

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

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.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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

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.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

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

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

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

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

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

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.

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

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

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

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

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 like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.

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

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

I’ve always been a fan of melody and emotional melancholy, whether it was Rites of Spring or Tears for Fears or Neil Young. If I hear a song that has a sweet melody, I’m a sucker for it, whether it’s Linkin Park or Little Richard.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

I cannot live without books.