I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.

I don’t read books much.

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

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.‘

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I’ve just always been a reader.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that’s going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

I’ve never canceled a subscription to a newspaper because of bad cartoons or editorials. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have any newspapers or magazines to read.

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

I read a lot when I’m travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

I don’t generally read reviews.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

Ebooks had to happen.

Electronic books are junk.

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

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

I’ve read a lot of books on the laws of attraction, and in my home, I have a big book on Muhammad Ali, which I’ve read because he is, like, a hero of mine, but other than that, no, I’m not a big reader.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

I cannot live without books.

To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I’ve got books I need to read.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

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.

I’ve read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of ‚You Can’t Go Home Again‘ and ‚Look Homeward, Angel.‘

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

I’m a bookworm. I know with my physical appearance that I don’t look like the typical reader. I’m in Barnes & Noble all the time, and you can look at people that look like they are supposed to be in there. I am in there, pants sagging, hat backwards.

‚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.

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

Most of my short stories are fantasy.