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.

I don’t read books much.

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

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.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.

Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

I spend a lot of time reading.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

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

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

The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat.

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

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

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

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

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

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

The cool thing about reading is that when you read a short story or you read something that takes your mind and expands where your thoughts can go, that’s powerful.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

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.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

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.‘

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

In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

Only God can look at somebody’s heart.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.

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

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.

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

The soul is your innermost being. The presence that you are beyond form. The consciousness that you are beyond form, that is the soul. That is who you are in essence.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

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

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

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 key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

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.

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

The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intentions.

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.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

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

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

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Within the soul of America is freedom of mind and spirit in man. Here alone are the open windows through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit. Here alone is human dignity not a dream but an accomplishment. Perhaps it is not perfect, but it is more full in realization here than any other place in the world.

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.