I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

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

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

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

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

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.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

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

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

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

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

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

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

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

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

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

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

I read poetry to save time.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

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 proper study of mankind is books.

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

If music be the food of love, play on.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

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?

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

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

The presence of passion within you is the greatest gift you can receive. Treat it as a miracle.

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

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

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

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Many readers fail to realize this, but ‚The Color Purple‘ is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one’s original God: the earth and nature.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

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

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

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

What I call my ‚self‘ now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.

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

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

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.

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.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.