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.

Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

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

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say ‚LOL.‘ Just what? But it means ‚laugh.‘ Why don’t you just laugh? What are you doing?

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

The Welsh people have a talent for acting that one does not find in the English. The English lack heart.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

I grew up cursing a lot.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

I used to read five psalms every day – that teaches me how to get along with God. Then I read a chapter of Proverbs every day and that teaches me how to get along with my fellow man.

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.

I try not to go around looking like a hag.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

My mother insisted that her children read.

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.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

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.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

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?

Nature is wont to hide herself.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

I like to feel blonde all over.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

I am a Christian, and the Bible teaches me to forgive.

Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

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

The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

I’d love to do a musical. I’ve been known to have a good step or two. I’m half Samoan, you know, and part of our culture is singing and dancing daily.

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.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‚Read,‘ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‚Don’t read, don’t think, just write,‘ and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

I cannot live without books.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

My lips, I’ve used collagen. I line my lips with collagen.

I grew up cursing a lot. It felt natural. My parents told me to stop.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

I’m getting a wrinkle above my eyebrow because I just can’t stop lifting it, and I love that you know.

I’ll never graduate from collagen.

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

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

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

I’m just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

Beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won’t like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it’s based on femininity.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

I read a lot when I’m travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.