Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Whatever you believe with feeling becomes your reality.

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.

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

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

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

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

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

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.

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

Seeing is not always believing.

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

When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.

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

Now is the winter of our discontent.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

It is a no-fail, incontrovertible reality: If you get, give. If you learn, teach. You can’t do anything with that except do it.

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

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

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

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

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

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.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

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

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

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

Social media has given us this idea that we should all have a posse of friends when in reality, if we have one or two really good friends, we are lucky.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

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.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

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

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‚Pilgrim’s Progress,‘ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‚sophisticated‘ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

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

Few people have the imagination for reality.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‚Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?‘

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

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

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

You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree’s fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down – bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.