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

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

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

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.

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

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

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

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

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

The proper study of mankind is books.

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.

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 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.

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

I read poetry to save time.

Books are divided 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.

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

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

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

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

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.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

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

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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.

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

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.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

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

Now is the winter of our discontent.

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

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

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.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.

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

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

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

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 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?

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

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.

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

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.

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

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

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

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

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.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.