I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

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

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

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

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

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.

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

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

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.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

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

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

I spend a lot of time reading.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

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

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.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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?

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

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

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

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.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

‚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.

‚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.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

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

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.

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

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

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

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

‚Royal Beatings‘ was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to ‚The New Yorker‘ in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. ‚The New Yorker‘ sent me nice notes, though – penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

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

The thing is, ‚Discworld‘ had been going on for a very long time, and I’ve written children’s books as well. Usually when people have a really big series they franchise it, which I thought is a bit of a no-no, so I thought what I’d do is I’d franchise it to myself.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

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

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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.