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

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

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

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

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

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

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

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

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

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.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

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

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

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

I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.

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

I grew up reading science fiction.

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.

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.

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.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

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.

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

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

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.

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

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

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

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my 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.

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

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

I read poetry to save time.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

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.

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

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

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

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

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

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.

The proper study of mankind is books.

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

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

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.

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.