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

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.

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

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

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

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.

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

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.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

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

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

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.

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

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

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

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

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

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

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

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

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

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

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

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

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.

I don’t generally read reviews.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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

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.

As for hobbies, I don’t really read or watch TV.

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.

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.

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.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

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

I am a part of everything that I have read.

The book you don’t read won’t help.

The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That’s one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.