The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

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

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.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

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

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

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

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

A home without books is a body without soul.

The U.S. is off the spectrum in religious commitment.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

I am not a fan of books.

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

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

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

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

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

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

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

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

I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

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.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

A witty saying proves nothing.

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

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

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.

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

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

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

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.

Hoover was a patriot in his heart, but he definitely exceeded his power.