I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

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

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.‘

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

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

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

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

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

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.

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?

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

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.

I am not a fan of books.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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.

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

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 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.

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

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

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

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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

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

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

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.

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

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

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

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

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

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

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.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

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

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

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

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

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

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.

I cannot live without books.

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

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

‚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.

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

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

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

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

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