Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

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

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

The just is close to the people’s heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

I read poetry to save time.

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

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.

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

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

I urge everyone to be trendsetters for Azza Suleiman. Let’s make it one fashion which everyone will want to follow.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. He has a heart capable of mirth, and naturally disposed to it.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Nothing is so strongly fortified that it cannot be taken by money.

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

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.‘

I was of the generation where most of the Disney princesses and female characters were not girls that I admired. They just weren’t characters I looked up to and identified with.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

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

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

I think the personal relationships I established mattered in terms of what I was able to get done. And I did bring women’s issues to the center of our foreign policy.

Reviews condition people. At the end of the day, a lot of human minds are malleable. They can be easily shaped with strong words.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

I spend a lot of time reading.

If you’re going to change things, you have to be with the people who hold the levers.

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

The influence of ‚Hidden Fortress‘ comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

Tina Turner is someone that I admire, because she made her strength feminine and sexy.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

The Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Aloysius Grade School influenced my life tremendously. This was due to the fact that they encouraged you always to make sure that God is the focus of your life, and they didn’t allow you to do anything except to the very best of your ability.

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.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.