I am not a fan of books.

I personally don’t like to go see romantic comedies. But people do want to see them, and they seem to want to see me in them.

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

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.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

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.

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.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

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 am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

I don’t just listen to rap.

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

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

I don’t really care how the Patriots are perceived, truthfully. I really don’t. I really don’t. Look, if you’re a fan of our team, you root for us, you believe in our team, and you believe in what we’re trying to accomplish. If you’re not a fan of us, you have a different opinion.

I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

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

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

My mother insisted that her children read.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

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

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 man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals‘ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

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

I spend a lot of time reading.

I think being funny is not anyone’s first choice.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

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.‘

Here’s something that’s contrary to popular belief: I actually don’t like thinking. I think people think I like to think a lot. And I don’t. I do not like to think at all.

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

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

I don’t read ‚chick lit,‘ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.