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

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

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

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.

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

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

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

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

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

I cannot live without books.

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.

If music be the food of love, play on.

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can’t stand it.

I’ve just always been a reader.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

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

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

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

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

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.

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

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.

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

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

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

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

This above all; to thine own self be true.

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

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

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

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

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

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

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

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.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

I like not fair terms and a villain’s mind.

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