Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

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.

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

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

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

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

‚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.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

I start each book when it’s ready and never before.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

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.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

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.‘

If you wish to be a writer, write.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

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

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.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

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

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

The writer must be a participant in the scene… like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

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.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

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

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

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

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

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.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

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.

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.‘

I’m a singer, a writer and an actress – when I find something that I feel good enough about doing.

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.