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

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

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

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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

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.

Fiction is based on reality unless you’re a fairytale artist.

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

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

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.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

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

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

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?

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

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.

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

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

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

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

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

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

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

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

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

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

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

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

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.