Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

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

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

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

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

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.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

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

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

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.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

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

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

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

A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.

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

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

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

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

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 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.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

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

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

How well he’s read, to reason against 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.

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

I grew up reading science fiction.

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.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

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

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

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

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.

If music be the food of love, play on.

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

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

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

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.

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?

The proper study of mankind is books.