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

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

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

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

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same things as Men did. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

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?

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

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

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.‘

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

I grew up reading science fiction.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

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.

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

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

Now is the winter of our discontent.

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

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

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.

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

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

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

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.

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

It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

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

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

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

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.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

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

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

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.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

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

I read poetry to save time.

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

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

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?

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