Charles Bukowski Quotes

I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it's what we were taught.

Macbeth was the first play I ever read.

I wasn't a model schoolboy. Of course, I was forced to sit through Shakespeare and I really got into some of it, though it depended on who was reading it out.

With any work worth its salt, you have to trust the author enough to take its measure. And if you apply too many preconceptions, you are not taking its measure.

The first time I read 'Leftovers,' I didn't get it at all.

'Jane Eyre,' when I think of that book, it conjures up the best moments of college English courses. Literature is extraordinary, especially when you have a good professor.

I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.

Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

I think you need brains to do any Shakespeare with any authority. I could do Shakespeare, but not with any authority.

William Shakespeare was a brilliant writer and he only wrote the truth. So, if I don't believe it, I have to work really hard to see what that truth is so that I do; that's the only way I can make it believable for the audience.

I've never been that keen on Shakespeare.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

I'm not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It's about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

I read one Jane Austen in college and didn't like it at all and told everyone how much I disliked it. I read 'Northanger Abbey' sophomore year in college and hated it. I didn't read good Austen until after college, maybe a couple years out.

Clarity is so important for Shakespeare.

I've been with Shakespeare all my life.

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.