I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

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

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

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

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

A lot was accomplished in my mixtape career. But I still needed a few things: I needed to be recognized. I need to have radio. I need to have a real retail machine that can get us where we need to get that.

If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

When you have box-office results, Hollywood treats you different. Hollywood stands up. Once you get to the point where Hollywood sees that you create results, then the demand for you becomes higher.

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

If music be the food of love, play on.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

I will never win an Oscar, and do you know why? First of all, because I’m not Jewish. Secondly, I make too much money for all those old farts in the Academy.

I meet young people who know me and are familiar with my stuff. They know the package. They might have cherry-picked five or six key tunes. That’s how it seems to work. I sometimes wonder if they realise they are not getting the whole context.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does.

My mother used to tell me man gives the award, God gives the reward. I don’t need another plaque.

My main focus is always to do well on the field for the Indian cricket team. When people say good things about me off the field, I am more than happy to accept them.

I was going to McDonald’s and Taco Bell every day. The kids behind the counter knew me – it wouldn’t even faze them. Or I’d sit up at Denny’s or Big Boy and just eat by myself. It was sad. I got so heavy that people started to not recognize me.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

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

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

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

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

A home without books is a body without soul.

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.

I don’t concern myself with award. I’d been to the party enough times to know it really didn’t matter.

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.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.

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.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

‚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.

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’ve been talked about by a lot better people than the general public.

It’s flattering to people who stop you and say that you’ve helped them and all. But, again, you know, you’ve got to stay humble because as quick as you came up, you can come down.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

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

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.

I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

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.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

I knew no one who’d ever been in the public eye.

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.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

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

As a sportsperson, the best thing is people recognising you and loving you for what you do. For me, glamour is 100 people in the hotel feeling happy to see you.

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

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.