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.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

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

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.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, ‚The Martian Chronicles.‘

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

Certainly I’m not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I’m a sponge. I’ve always been a sponge.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I’ve got books I need to read.

From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

They might not need me; but they might. I’ll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‚feeling‘ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

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

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

I didn’t play with other children.

Where I grew up – I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights – that’s every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don’t want your kids to hear growing up.

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?

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

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

I was ironing my own clothes when I was 11 years old. My mental strength goes back to those days.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, ‚I want to get out and become like him‘. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

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.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

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

Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.

My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha’am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha’am’s essays.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

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

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

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

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

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

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

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.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading.

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.

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