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 spend a lot of time reading.

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

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don’t want it smoothed out.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

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

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

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.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

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

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

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

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.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

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.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

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

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

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

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

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

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

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

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.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

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.‘

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

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

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

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.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

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

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

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!

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.