I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.

The life of an uneducated man is as useless as the tail of a dog which neither covers its rear end, nor protects it from the bites of insects.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

As I see it, fast food outfits have targeted small children with their advertising in a very effective way. You know, it’s clowns and kid’s toys and bright colors and things like that.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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

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

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.

‚Kiss Land‘ is like a horror movie.

I never needed much, and I never thought I’d get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.

I like to talk about lint and coasters, the expansion of the universe and maybe McDonald’s. I’m completely turned off by the idea of politics.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

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

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

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

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

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

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.

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.

There’s no difference between movies and television. None at all. Except in a lot of cases, television’s much better than movies.

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.

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

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

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.

Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.

A lot of people think international relations is like a game of chess. But it’s not a game of chess, where people sit quietly, thinking out their strategy, taking their time between moves. It’s more like a game of billiards, with a bunch of balls clustered together.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

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

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

Oh yes, there’s lots of great food in America. But the fast food is about as destructive and evil as it gets. It celebrates a mentality of sloth, convenience, and a cheerful embrace of food we know is hurting us.

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

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

I tell people, and it’s the truth, I could sit in my garage for a week and it won’t make me a car. And you can sit in church till your bottom is flat and that won’t make you a servant of Christ.

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

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.

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

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.‘

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

I don’t read books much.

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

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation – or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays – is like a blind man’s dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.