literature quotes

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

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

I cannot live without books.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

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

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

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.

I don’t read books much.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

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.

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.

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.‘

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

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.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

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.‘

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.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

I spend a lot of time reading.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

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

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

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

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

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?

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.

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

‚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.

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.

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.

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

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

Now is the winter of our discontent.

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.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.