“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.”

As quoted in "Bradbury Still Believes in Heat of ‘Fahrenheit 451’" http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930312&slug=1689996, interview by Misha Berson, in ', credited to "Ray Bradbury, quoted by Misha Berson in Seattle Times", in "Quotable Quotes", The Reader's Digest, Vol. 144, No. 861, January 1994, p. 25 http://books.google.com/books?output=html&id=ZqqUAAAAIAAJ&q=%22people+to+stop+reading%22#search_anchor), or an indirect reference to the re-quoting in Reader's Digest (such as: The Times Book of Quotations (Philip Howard, ed.), 2000, Times Books and HarperCollins, p. 93
Variant: We're not teaching kids to read and write and think. … There's no reason to burn books if you don't read them.
As quoted in "At 80, Ray Bradbury Still Fighting the Future He Foresaw" http://www.raybradbury.com/articles_peoria.html, interview by Roger Moore, in The Peoria Journal Star (August 2000)
Context: The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us – it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. … You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Variant: Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.
Source: Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan