I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

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

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

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

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

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 put a lot of pressure on myself. I think something’s not good enough, and I won’t stop until I feel like I’ve made it. I’m never satisfied.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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

I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don’t really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be, and I really like that, too, so it depends. I’ve always had more than one thing going.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

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

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

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

Now is the winter of our discontent.

A home without books is a body without soul.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

I write the paragraph, then I’m crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it’s almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

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

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I’m very picky; I’m never happy with anything. It’s so hard to give the record away and accept that you’re done.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

‚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.

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

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I grew up reading science fiction.

I’ve just always been a reader.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

In art the best is good enough.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

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

Each book I’ve done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

The proper study of mankind is books.

I’m like a recovering perfectionist. For me it’s one day at a time.

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.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

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.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‚Thirty days hath September‘ because it actually tells you something.

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.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.