“At present I'm re-reading Traherne's Centuries of Meditations which I think almost the most beautiful book (in prose, I mean, excluding poets) in English.”

“The cinema may have a specific beauty of its own, but it does not permit that constant re-reading, that meditative brooding, those turning-back to passages heavily charged with meaning, which form the special pleasure of the novel-reader.”

“I was on a promotional tour in Great Britain, and I stopped in Wales. I was there for three days and I ran out of books to read. I went to a local bookstore and asked the person working there to recommend some books in English. He suggested a collection by a poet who was from the area but warned me that the book wasn’t selling very well. The poet was R. S. Thomas, and I bought everything they had. As I read him, I realized that he was the most important poet I could be reading at that point in my life.”

“I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books — brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.”

“I have a problem in living which century I live. When I read those manuscripts, I'm taken away there. Sometimes I'm totally taken with them, with the monks and the ancient libraries and the ancient monasteries and then, when someone passes by me in their office and speaks English, I say, "What?" But then I realize I am in an English-speaking world.”

“Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”

“Read Homer once, and you can read no more;
For all books else appear so mean, so poor,
Verse will seem prose; but still persist to read,
And Homer will be all the books you need.”

“I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.”

“The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”

“I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”