“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

Adventures are all very well in their place, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Not only are there no happy endings,’ she told him, ‘there aren’t even any endings.

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

An Angel who did not so much fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, Leave no path untaken.

I can read in red. I can read in blue. I can read in pickle color too.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

I read an hour almost every night. It’s part of falling asleep.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

I conceive a knowledge of books is the basis upon which other knowledge is to be built.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.