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

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.

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.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

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

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

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.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

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.

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

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

I cannot live without books.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

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.

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.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

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

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

I must be cruel, only to be kind.

I dote on his very absence.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

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

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

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.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

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

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

I really hope someday in Hollywood, some producer or director will hire me only to do drama.

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.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

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

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

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

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

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

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

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’ve just always been a reader.

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

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

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

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

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

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

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

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

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

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

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 know a dramatic role is going to happen, but you just got to be patient, you know? It’s going to happen when it’s supposed to happen. I’m not rushing it. I’m not trying to make it happen tomorrow.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

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

Though she be but little, she is fierce.