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

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

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

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

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.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

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.

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

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

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

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

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

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

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

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

I am not a fan of books.

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

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.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

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

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.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

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

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

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

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

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

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