‚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.

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

You do get certain publications in the States where, if things don’t go according to plan, they flip the story and it becomes very negative.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

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

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

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

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they’d be, what position they’d play and so on.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

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.

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

I don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

Necessity… the mother of invention.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

My style influences my music and everything around me.