Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

We don't read and write poetry because its cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is full of passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering: these are noble pursuits necessary to sustain life, but poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for.

I thought I could capture the stories of the city on paper. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city. Horror stories you see. I tell you I didn't have to look far for material. Everywhere I looked, there were stories hidden there in the dark corners. . . I wrote and still there were more. . . No one would publish them. 'Too horrible,' they said. 'Sick mind,' they said. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city, but the horror is too big and it goes on forever.

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.

Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.

The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart. There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to the worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her bones. The quena has a more penetrating more haunting sound than the ordinary flute. Those who write know the process. I thought of it as I was spitting out my heart. Only I do not wait for my love to die.

Okay, I'm sorry I don't write poems about sunsets and nature and mystical experiences, I only know what I know; I could write that the sight of a sunset lit up my mind like Light Brite and I was enlightened, or that the sun and moon are my mother and father; but I can't - I can only write with any semblance of truth about what contains my simple frame of reference.

There's an element of contempt for meanings. You want to write outside the usual framework. You want to dare readers to make a commitment you know they can't make. That's part of [crazed prose]. There's also the sense of drowning in information and in the mass awareness of things. Everybody seems to know everything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a matter of days. . . The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren't arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, dear reader, if you went back to the living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don't really want to be here.

Writing will be your companion through the darkest and brightest days of your life - if that is what you want. It exposes pain and guilt and the greatest joy. It is your own assessment of who you are. You should write as much as you can and as much as you want to. It will be something to turn to.

Sometimes paper is the only thing that will listen to you.

If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.

I write constantly, but only in my journals. I have three of them: one for travel, one for home, and one I write in before bed. But the last thing I want is other people reading it. . . What's really fun is reading your journal, like a year later, or even a month, and realizing how much you've changed. You're looking at something you said, something you really meant at the time, and you're like, 'I can't believe I ever really believed that! I am such an asshole!' I think that's the greatest thing about growing up. . .

I've been writing on this private stretch of land, counting these five years and wondering why. I mean, it was diffrent that time with Ezio Pinza flying a kite. Maybe, after all, he knew something more and was right.

A woman who writes feels too much. She thinks she can warn the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dear love, I am that girl.

I begin again, Dr. Y., this neverland journal, full of my own sense of filth. Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?

Men are running across a field, pens fall from their pockets. People walking will pick them up. It is one of the ways letters are written. How things fall to others! The self no longer belonging to me, but asleep in a stranger's shadow, now clothing the stranger, now leading him off. It is noon as I write to you. Someone's life has come into my hands. The sun whitens the buildings. It is all I have. I give it all to you.

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel as if you've lost a friend.

You can't guarantee things like that! After all, when we had books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They're Ceasar's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Ceasar, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money, or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but only the way the average chap will ever see ninety nine percent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like flouride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

If I were to choose between the power of writing a poem and the ecstasy of a poem unwritten, I would choose the ecstasy. It is better poetry. But you and all my neighbors agree that I always choose badly.

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.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck, desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.

As for me, my dearest Foxxy, my poems to you may or may not reach the icebox and its hopeful eternity, for isn't yours enough?

Yet, nothing is certain. The poem that has stolen these words form my mouth may not be this poem.