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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

If music be the food of love, play on.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

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

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

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

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

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

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

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

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

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere.

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

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.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Barack Obama did tell me that I was one of Michelle Obama’s favorite actors.

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

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

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

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.

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.

The Joker is my favorite villain of all time: You don’t know his past; you just know what his plans are.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

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

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?

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

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.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

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

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

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

A home without books is a body without soul.

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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

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.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

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

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

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

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

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

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

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.‘

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.