I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

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

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

It was such a leap in my career when ‚Truman Show‘ came along. It’s always been a long process for me insofar as recognition goes, but that’s OK because you appreciate it when it comes.

It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

There’s a lot of great movies that have won the Academy Award, and a lot of great movies that haven’t. You just do the best you can.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

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.

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

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

Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn’t women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?

It’s cool to be recognised by your peers.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Man gives you the award but God gives you the reward.

One thing I just want to say to the military families – while you might not wear a uniform, I know – we all know, the nation knows – that you serve and sacrifice right alongside of your loved ones. And we are so grateful and proud of all of you for your service to this nation.

I don’t concern myself with award. I’d been to the party enough times to know it really didn’t matter.

If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.

I’m over being a pop star. I don’t wanna be a hot girl. I wanna be iconic. And I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. I feel like I’m highly respected, which is more important than any award or any amount of records. And I feel like there comes a point when being a pop star is not enough.

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

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

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.

To be recognized for the hard work my team and I put into ‚Starboy‘ is an honor.

If cash comes with fame, come fame; if cash comes without fame, come cash.

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.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.

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

In the past when I was in Hollywood, I was like a dog. I felt humiliated. My English was not good. People would even ask me ‚Jackie Who?‘.

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 don’t want flowers or candy or anything like that. I just want somebody to say, ‚Wow, you’ve done a great job.‘

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

As a sportsperson, the best thing is people recognising you and loving you for what you do. For me, glamour is 100 people in the hotel feeling happy to see you.

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 will never win an Oscar, and do you know why? First of all, because I’m not Jewish. Secondly, I make too much money for all those old farts in the Academy.

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.

I’m glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

I guess we all like to be recognized not for one piece of fireworks, but for the ledger of our daily work.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

I’ve been talked about by a lot better people than the general public.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

There’s Madeleine, and then there’s ‚Madeleine Albright‘. And I sometimes kind of think, who is this person? Once you become ‚Madeleine Albright‘ it doesn’t go away.

People see me on the street, and they point to me, and they’re like, ‚Hey! All right, all right, all right!‘

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I do get recognized, but I must say Edinburgh is a fantastic city to live if you’re well-known. There is an innate respect for privacy in Edinburgh people, and I also think they’re used to seeing me walking around, so I don’t think I’m a very big deal.

I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

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

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.