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

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

I grew up reading science fiction.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

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

A home without books is a body without soul.

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

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

‚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.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

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

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

‚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.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

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

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

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.

I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

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

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

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

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

I’ve just always been a reader.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

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

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.‘

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

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

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.

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.

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

The proper study of mankind is books.

‚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.

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

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

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

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

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

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

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.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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.

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.