A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.

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

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

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

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

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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

I cannot live without books.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

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

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

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.

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

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.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

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.

I read poetry to save time.

To me, being the best means proving it in different countries and championships.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same things as Men did. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

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 do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

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

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

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.‘

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

I wanted to tell the story of Luong Ung, who’s a dear friend of mine.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

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

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

‚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.