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

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.

That’s what I do this for, to secure my family’s future. I don’t care about anything else. I’m able to spoil people, and that’s the best thing.

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.

It’s tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I’m wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.

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

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

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

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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

I cannot live without books.

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

I grew up reading science fiction.

I just want to make sure when I have kids, I can spend time with them. That’s the whole point.

It takes up enough of my time and interest just working on comedy. I just enjoy it and love doing it.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

The kids are a big part of my schedule.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.

It’s life isn’t it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

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.

Time is the least thing we have of.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

Action expresses priorities.

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

Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

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

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

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

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

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

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.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

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.

My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did my own.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

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

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

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.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.

Make measurable progress in reasonable time.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.