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.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

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.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

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

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

Well, everyone likes movies when they’re a little kid.

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

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 wasn’t allowed to go to movies when I was kid; my father was a minister. 101 Dalmatians and King of Kings, that was the extent of it.

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

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

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

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

The proper study of mankind is books.

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

I read to my kid, but I can’t stand reading.

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

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

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

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

When I was little… I didn’t relate to princesses. I saw Maleficent, and I just thought she was so – she was so elegant.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

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

From my childhood I had been intended for the clergy. This prospect hung like a dark cloud on my mind.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

I grew up reading science fiction.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

My mother insisted that her children read.

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.

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

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

Even as a child, Muhammad Ali got perverse pleasure out of being different. He liked the attention it got him, but most of all he just liked being himself: odd and independent.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

I have worked hard since my childhood and worked as a labourer. I put my mind and heart into it.

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

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

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

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

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.

The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours – and I think probably gave me many nightmares.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.