Henry David Thoreau Quotes

I was learning book-keeping at the age of 12, but it never stopped me from pursuing literature. Over the years, I grew to love the written word.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

I really came to literature through poetry.

Today, everything I do from morning meditation on - eating breakfast, going for a walk, writing, reading, even recreation - is governed by one purpose only: how to give the very best account of my life that I can in the service of all.

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

For me, books are music for my mind and my imagination. When I am stuck in something I'm writing, I simply read my way out of being stuck. You can never waste time reading.

Before entering the seminary, I had not encountered the life-changing potential of reading as a source of meaning, as a way of ordering one's inner life, and being rooted in the world.

I should have written books instead of reading them.

Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.

Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.

The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.

I got more true knowledge from reading the Book of God in one month, than I could ever have acquired from all the writings of men.

She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.

I never imagined I'd write a book.

Many years ago, in the late '70s, I toured colleges along the East Coast and I presented a kind of show where I got a lot of books and poetry and pieces of [William] Shakespeare and other writers that I admire, read it to the class and then afterward we would talk and I would answer questions. It was really a way of expressing and finding out about where I was at that particular time, so it was very therapeutic for me.

Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one's first productions.

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.

The principal object of your reading should be for the acquisition of useful knowledge , and the strengthening, refining, and ennobling of your character.

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

The advice I continually give to young writers is this, "Learn to paint pictures with words." Not just once upon a time, but ... In the long secret dust of ages, beneath a blue forgotten sky, where trade winds caress the sun bleached shores of unknown realms ... See, as much as there are words in poetry, there is a poetry in words. Use it, stay faithful to the path you have set your heart upon and follow it.

The gift of creative reading, like all natural gifts, must be nourished or it will atrophy. And you nourish it, in much the same way you nourish the gift of writing - you read, think, talk, look, listen, hate, fear, love, weep - and bring all of your life like a sieve to what you read. That which is not worthy of your gift will quickly pass through, but the gold remains.

Reading makes me want to write my own books, and just trying to understand what I see in the world around me makes me want to figure things out.

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.