Literary Education Quotes

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

I know in this time of great technological advancement, the idea of reading a book seems almost anachronistic, but I think it's worth preserving.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired, I thought I must do something, and I've always read a lot of fiction - you learn so much from fiction. My sentimental education came mostly from fiction, I should say, so I thought I'd try.

Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.

When I was a teenager, I remember the extraordinary feeling of accomplishment for completing 'Vanity Fair.' I don't think it was even for school.

Growing up in San Antonio, I was the dork at the Friday night football games with my head buried in a book - Jack Kerouac or Oscar Wilde, years before I really understood them.

For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.

I don't even know how people read new fiction anymore because there's so much old fiction that exists that seems great that's unread. It's overwhelming to me. But, I mean, I do read. But there probably haven't been many people less literate than me that have been in 'The Paris Review.'

Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

I don't really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It's a bad idea, terrible. I've met creative-writing majors from other places and they don't know a goddamn thing. They're the worst students. They just think they're good because they could pass.

I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.

Shakespeare I love, but for an English graduate, I'm incredibly badly read.

So I grew up in a very book-friendly environment and my education as a writer was reading. I think that's the best education. Reading, and taking from the people I admired.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

Keeping young people away from Shakespeare is like removing a link to their humanness.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.