When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Someone once threw me a small, brown, hairy kiwi fruit, and I threw a wastebasket over it until it was dead.

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way. My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen.

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time… I think I’ve forgotten this before.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

It’s a funny old world.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

The secret to humor is surprise.

My husband calls me ‚catfish.‘ He says I’m all mouth and no brains.

Teach a parrot the terms ‚supply and demand‘ and you’ve got an economist.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Love is too young to know what conscience is.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

Marrying an old bachelor is like buying second-hand furniture.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

The greatest thing about being a comedian is knowing other comedians. And you get to talk to them. Its the most fun.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

I must have read every issue of ‚Punch‘ published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour – that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like ‚Three Men in a Boat.‘

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on on the outside!

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

My comedy is different every time I do it. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

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.

Don’t just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

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.‘

Some sarcasm is best told simply.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

I don’t believe in the after life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.

Nothing can come of nothing.

No man goes before his time – unless the boss leaves early.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, ‚Truth is the daughter of Time.‘

I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

We’re a phenomenally snobby society, and it’s such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny: it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

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.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.

My husband says I look like a Q-tip.