And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

I’m guarded; I don’t talk much.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn’t matter. You said, ‚That’s an American‘ because there’s a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

I have an answering machine in my car. It says, I’m home now. But leave a message and I’ll call when I’m out.

Be not a slave of words.

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

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

One might say that our words are a movie screen that reveals what we have been thinking and the attitudes we have.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it’s usually lousy.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

I am not one who – who flamboyantly believes in throwing a lot of words around.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.

Never find fault with the absent.

Silence is safer than speech.

I don’t want to just preach to the church. I feel like I have a broader message.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

‚No comment‘ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I’m animated.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

I don’t like people going behind my back.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

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.

All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me, and I’d worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them: ‚Don’t hide these things from me. I’d rather you ask me these things straight out, and I’ll answer all your questions.‘

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

I’m a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in ‚I Shall Wear Midnight,‘ which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

What you guys want, I’m for.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

How to drive a guy crazy: send him a telegram and on the top put ‚page 2.‘

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

I grew up reading science fiction.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

I don’t say very much I don’t really think through. I know that sounds inconsistent with Joe Biden.

Of course you can’t ‚trust‘ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‚trust‘ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

I will listen to anyone’s convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.