It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read.

This was such bad writing that it was good.

I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire.

There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.

Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.

A great friend of mine at the beginning of our friendship (he was himself a poet) said to me very defiantly, 'I have to tell you that I loathe children's books…

A real book reads us. I have been read by Eliot's poems and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle for a good many years now, since ear…