A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

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

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.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

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

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

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.

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

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

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

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

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

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.

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

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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

Success in training the boy depends largely on the Scoutmaster’s own personal example.

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.

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.

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

It’s not easy to define poetry.

‚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.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

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.

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.

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.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

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

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

I saw a boy of the crew purchasing javelins of them with bits of platters and broken glass.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

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

Biography lends to death a new terror.

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

I read poetry to save time.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

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

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

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

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

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

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew’s cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo’s choice to know the truth. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.

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

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

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.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.