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

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

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

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

I read poetry to save time.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

‚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.

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

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

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

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

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

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

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

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

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.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

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

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.

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

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

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

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

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

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

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.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

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 rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Now is the winter of our discontent.

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

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

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

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

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

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

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

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

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