By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.
I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.
Children of the future age Reading this indignant page Know that in a former time Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.
Who are you, a hundred years from today, reading my poetry with curiosity?
A lamp can only light another lamp when it continues to burn in its own flame.
Sometimes I wish the public were equally aware of the men of our race in the cultural fields. You, for instance, have you ever bought a book by a Negro writer?
Imagine – four years you could have spent travelling around Europe meeting people, or going to the Far East of Africa or India, meeting people, exchanging ideas, reading all you wanted to anyway, and instead I wasted it at Roosevelt.
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed-reading accident. I hit a bookmark.
I took a course in speed reading. Then I got Reader’s Digest on microfilm. By the time I got the machine set up, I was done.
I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.
I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it.
It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.
Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
It is not how many books thou hast, but how good; careful reading profiteth, while that which is full of variety delighteth.
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.
I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It’s as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.
What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was ’perhaps.