I've learned mainly by reading myself. So I don't think I have any original ideas. Certainly, I talk about reading Graham. I've read Phil Fisher. So I've gotten a lot of my ideas from reading. You can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don't have to get too many new ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.
If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid
Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity ... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.
From reading of the people I admired - ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge and Morgan's riflemen to my Southern forefathers and kinfolk - I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world. And I had a great desire to be like them.
You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?
The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.