The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.

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

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

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

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

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

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.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

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.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

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.

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

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

If music be the food of love, play on.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

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.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

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

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.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

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?

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

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.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

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.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

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

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

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

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.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.