Maya Angelou Quotes

'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.

I love storytelling. I love characters that are complicated and layered, real people, that you see why they do what they do.

When you fall in love with a book, something especially interesting and exciting is happening because of the way language works on us as human beings. And I love language.

It's a very powerful, emotional thing to read a book, and to reduce it to a series of questions in a test strips something away from the book.

I think sometimes people can get lost in the bigger special effects, science fiction, robot stuff, and those are cool and fun to watch, too, but I think it's so important to sometimes step back and watch something that's about life and human interaction.

I love stories. But I don't distinguish so much between a short story and a novel. Personally, when I sit down to read a novel or a Chekhov story, I'm seeking the same thing: I'm seeking that same rich portrayal of life in words.

I was 36 when I played Nicholas Nickleby.

Rereading 'Child 44' brought out the novel's meatier pleasures, its ability to create vivid characters in a world both alien to our own and chillingly recognizable.

I remember when I was reading 'The Bear,' I was reading as a kid. All these years later, one returns to that for an entirely different reason.

The hours I spent attempting to decipher some of Dunnett's more oblique passages opened me to the possibilities of romantic storytelling.

I read the novel 'Miracle at St. Anna' when it was first released, and I loved it.

One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.

'Beloved' is a book that makes me cry.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.

Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.

My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of what it is to be human.

The hearts of all men dwell in the same wilderness.

I'm old-school. I like action, but I want to see somebody fall in love. I want to see that life stuff.

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

Somewhere in the arrangement of this world there seems to be a great concern about giving us delight, which shows that, in the universe, over and above the meaning of matter and forces, there is a message conveyed through the magic touch of personality. ... Is it merely because the rose is round and pink that it gives me more satisfaction than the gold which could buy me the necessities of life, or any number of slaves. ... Somehow we feel that through a rose the language of love reached our hearts.