It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

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.

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

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.

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.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

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

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

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

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

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

A home without books is a body without soul.

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.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

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.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

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

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

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

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

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

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

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

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

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.‘

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

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

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.

I spend a lot of time reading.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

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

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

A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.

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

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

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?

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

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

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?

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

I’ve just always been a reader.

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

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

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.

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

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.