When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Players now have a groin injury for months and months, and I often think they don’t really give a toss whether they’re playing or not because they’re getting paid anyway.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

The thing is, ‚Discworld‘ had been going on for a very long time, and I’ve written children’s books as well. Usually when people have a really big series they franchise it, which I thought is a bit of a no-no, so I thought what I’d do is I’d franchise it to myself.

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.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

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.

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

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!

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

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

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

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

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

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

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

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

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

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

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.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

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.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

I fell and broke my pelvic bone in three places. So, I’m still sort of an invalid now.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

If you’re not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.

I start each book when it’s ready and never before.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they’re rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.