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.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.

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

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.

Here’s what I believe, I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in the history of the world but i think there was some bad apples over there.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

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.

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

The titanic effort that has brought liberation to South Africa, and ensured the total liberation of Africa, constitutes an act of redemption for the black people of the world.

Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

In the ’70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.

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?

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

If music be the food of love, play on.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

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.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity – or it will move apart.

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

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

I cannot live without books.

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

The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.

Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

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

Empire and liberty.

Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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.

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.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

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