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"I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it."
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"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."

"There is no other enjoyment like reading."

"Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes."

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

"Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book."

"Books are always good company if you have the right sort. Let me pick out some for you.' And Mrs. Jo made a bee-line to the well-laden shelves, which were the joy of her heart and the comfort of her life."

"Kindle, isn't it? the waitress asked. "I got one for Christmas, and I love it. I'm reading my way through all of Jodi Picoult's books. "Oh, probably not all of them, Wesley said. "Huh? Why not? "She's probably got another one done already. That's all I meant. "And James Patterson's probably written one since he got up this morning! she said, and went off chortling."
Explore more quotes by James Laughlin

"I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence."

"I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention."

"We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry."

"I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian."

"With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said."

"I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra."

"I think most people read and re-read the things that they have liked. That's certainly true in my case. I re-read Pound a great deal, I re-read Williams, I re-read Thomas, I re-read the people whom I cam to love when I was at what you might call a formative stage."

"The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably."

"I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago."

"Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going."
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