The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

I knew early on that I wanted to entertain in some form. And I knew I would work as hard as anyone to do it.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I’m animated.

SNL is a home. You’ve got all of your brothers and sisters there, and it’s a great time.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

I love to pop up at the movie theaters. I love to treat the people who are there.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I’m invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who’ll play the piano after dinner, and I know you’re not really invited for yourself. You’re just an ornament.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

I guess any movie actor can become a role model for audiences out there who enjoy him.

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, ‚I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!‘ is so sociologically fascinating that I think I’d better watch.

It’s fun to be hopelessly in love. It’s dangerous, but it’s fun.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

I think that people are interested seeing me on the screen.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

I fall in love every day. Not with people but with situations.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

When Jerry Springer thinks you’ve gone too far, my friends, you have gone too far.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

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.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

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

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

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.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

Acting is happy agony.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

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.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

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

I grew up reading science fiction.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

Bitterness is cancer – it eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.

The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That’s one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.