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.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

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

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

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

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

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

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.

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

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.

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

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

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

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

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

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

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

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

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

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I read poetry to save time.

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

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

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

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

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

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

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

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

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

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

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

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

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

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

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

A home without books is a body without soul.

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.

I don’t read books much.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

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

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

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.

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

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.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

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.

I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.