My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

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.

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you’re listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

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

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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

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

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

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

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

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 books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

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

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

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

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

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.

Grace is not part of consciousness; it is the amount of light in our souls, not knowledge nor reason.

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.

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

It is my own firm belief that the strength of the soul grows in proportion as you subdue the flesh.

The eyes of the soul of the multitudes are unable to endure the vision of the divine.

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

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.

Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Oh, hour of forgiven sin, moment of perfect pardon, our soul shall never forget you while, within you, life and being find immortality!

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

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.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

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

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

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?

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

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

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.

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

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

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

I cannot live without books.

It’s so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that’s what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

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

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.