I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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‘.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

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.

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 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.

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.

‚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.

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.

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.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

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

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

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.

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

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

Ebooks had to happen.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

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

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

Electronic books are junk.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

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.

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.‘

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

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

‚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.

I don’t generally read reviews.

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

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

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

‚Recreative‘ is a word that I invented because in urban culture, with colloquialism, we invent so many slangs. I don’t like the way that ‚recreational‘ sounds – I don’t like to say I do a lot of ‚recreational‘ reading. I like to say that I read ‚recreatively.‘ I do a lot of ‚recreative‘ reading.

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

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.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

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

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

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

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.

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.

I’ve just always been a reader.

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

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

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

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’m an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.