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

It’s not easy to define poetry.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

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.

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

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

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

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.

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

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

‚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.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

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

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

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

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

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

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

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 book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

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

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

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

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.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

I read poetry to save time.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

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.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

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.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

I must have read every issue of ‚Punch‘ published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour – that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like ‚Three Men in a Boat.‘

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

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.

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

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

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 wasn’t a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn’t written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

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