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

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

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

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

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

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

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.

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’ve just always been a reader.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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

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

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

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.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

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.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

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

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

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

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

I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

I wasn’t a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn’t written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

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.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

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

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

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‚Don’t try.‘ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

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.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

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

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

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‚Thirty days hath September‘ because it actually tells you something.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.