I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Ebooks had to happen.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

I’m a bookworm. I know with my physical appearance that I don’t look like the typical reader. I’m in Barnes & Noble all the time, and you can look at people that look like they are supposed to be in there. I am in there, pants sagging, hat backwards.

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I’ve got books I need to read.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

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

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

I cannot live without books.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

I’ve read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of ‚You Can’t Go Home Again‘ and ‚Look Homeward, Angel.‘

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

I’ve never canceled a subscription to a newspaper because of bad cartoons or editorials. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have any newspapers or magazines to read.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

Electronic books are junk.

I read a lot when I’m travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

I’ve read a lot of books on the laws of attraction, and in my home, I have a big book on Muhammad Ali, which I’ve read because he is, like, a hero of mine, but other than that, no, I’m not a big reader.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

I don’t generally read reviews.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

I’m an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.