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

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.

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

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

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

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

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

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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!

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

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

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 every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

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.

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

I am not a fan of books.

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.

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

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

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

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.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

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

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

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

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

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

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

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

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

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

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

I’ve just always been a reader.

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

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

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.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‚Thirty days hath September‘ because it actually tells you something.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

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.

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.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

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

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

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

I don’t read books much.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

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.

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.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

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.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.