It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

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

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

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

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

I spend a lot of time reading.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

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

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

I read poetry to save time.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

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

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

I think the definition of a book is changing.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

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

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.