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

Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

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.

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

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I like Tom Ford a lot because it’s so classic and has great quality. I wear a lot of Rag & Bone.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

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.

The learned is happy, nature to explore; The fool is happy, that he knows no more.

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.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I am in the world feeling my way to light ‚amid the encircling gloom.‘

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

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

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.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

I cannot live without books.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

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.

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.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

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

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same things as Men did. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered.

Whatever I’m feeling, whatever I’m going through, whatever mood I’m in… If I’m feeling like dancing or clubbing, then it will be reflected in the music. If I’m feeling dark and vulnerable, then it will reflect in the music, too.

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

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

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

But time has set its maggot on their track.

Stand a little less between me and the sun.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

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.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.