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

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

A home without books is a body without soul.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

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.

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

If music be the food of love, play on.

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.

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.‘

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

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

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

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

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

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

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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

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.‘

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.

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?

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

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

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

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

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

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

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.

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.

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

It’s not easy to define poetry.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

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

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

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

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

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

I am pro-education. I’m just anti the system.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

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.

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

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

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.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

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

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?

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

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

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

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

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.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.