Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

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.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

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

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

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

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

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.

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.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

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.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

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 key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

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

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

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

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

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

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?

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.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

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.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

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

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.

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.

If music be the food of love, play on.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

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.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.

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

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

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.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.

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

I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

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

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

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.