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What this country needs is a great poem. John Brown’s Body was a step in the right direction. I’ve read it once, and I’m reading it again. But it’s too long to do what I mean. You can’t thrill people in 300 pages... The limit is about 300 words. Kipling’s “Recessional” really did something to England when it was published. It helped them through a bad time. Let me know if you find any great poems lying around.
--
To Christopher Morley, quoted in Saturday Review Treasury (1957)

 

Herbert Hoover

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I was a bookish kid. I spent long hours in the library reading everything I could find, histories, biographies, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries. I was curious about the world and there’s no better way to find things out than through the pages of a book. Even today if some kid asks me what’s the first step to take to become a doctor, I answer, “Read, read, read.”

 

Sanjay Gupta

 

The most distinguishing feature, or, at least, one of the most distinguishing features, of the great change effected in 1832 was that those who effected it at once abolished all the franchises as ancient as those of the Baronage of England; and, while they abolished them, they offered and proposed no substitute. The discontent upon the subject of representation which afterwards more or less pervaded our society dates from that period, and that discontent, all will admit, has ceased. It was terminated by the Act of Parliamentary Reform of 1867-8. That act was founded on a confidence that the great body of the people of this country were "Conservative". I use the word in its purest and loftiest sense. I mean that the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness—that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, the empire of England—that they believe, on the whole, that the greatness and the empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of this country...There are people who may be, or who at least affect to be, working men, and who, no doubt, have a certain influence with a certain portion of the metropolitan working class, who talk Jacobinism...I say with confidence that the great body of the working class of England utterly repudiate such sentiments. They have no sympathy with them. They are English to the core. They repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire. Well, then, as regards the political institutions of this country, the maintenance of which is one of the chief tenets of the Tory party, so far as I can read public opinion, the feeling of the nation is in accordance with the Tory party.

 

Benjamin Disraeli

 

Thereafter, when he himself was dead, he imagined that his poems would be published in some mysterious way, and the nation would read them for comfort in adversity, as it had read the poems of other poets before him; it was his highest wish that his poems could help those as unfortunate as himself to have patience to endure.

 

Halldor Laxness

 

The eighteenth-century polymath Thomas Young was the last person to have read all the books published in his lifetime. That means that he would've read all the Shakespeare and all the Greek and Roman classics and all the theology and all the philosophy and all the science. But the same man today, a man who had read all the books published today, would've had to've read all Dan Brown's novels, two volumes of Chris Moyles' autobiography, The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson II by Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson III by Jeremy Clarkson... his mind would be awash with bad metaphors and unsustainable, reactionary opinion; one long anecdote about the time that Comedy Dave put pound coins in the urinal. In short, the man who had read everything published today would be more stupid than a man who had read nothing. That's not a good state of affairs.

 

Stewart Lee

 

A friend came over to the house
a few days ago and read one of my poems.
He came back today and asked to read the
same poem over again. After he finished
reading it, he said, "It makes me want to write poetry."

 

Richard Brautigan