I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

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

Laws should be interpreted in a liberal sense so that their intention may be preserved.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

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

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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!

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.

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

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

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

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

I’ve just always been a reader.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

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

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

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.‘

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

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.

If music be the food of love, play on.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

The word ‚good‘ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

I don’t read books much.

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.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

A person hears only what they understand.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

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

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

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

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

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

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

Sometimes I think that there’s a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

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.

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.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

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