Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I didn't think; I experimented.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Every dogma has its day.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

The unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon.

Bath twice a day to be really clean, once a day to be passably clean, once a week to avoid being a public menace.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

I'm a natural clown, I suppose, in writing, and one has to accept that; I can't do anything about it. I have written one or two novels which are not specifically funny. I wrote a study of Shakespeare which was not intended to be funny, but some people regard it as such.

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.

Bath twice a day to be really clean once a day to be passably clean once a week to avoid being a public menace.

If you believe in an unseen Christ you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others.

Laugh and the world laughs with you snore and you sleep alone.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community

Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore, and you sleep alone!

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

The overwhelming majority of my rated wealth consists of investments in companies that produce goods and services.

I think it's pathetic that a court of law cannot be in a vacuum of the legal system, without the influence of the public threatening to do great bodily harm to people and property. It's really a pathetic statement for our country.

I understand Twitter has become popular among politicians. This technology allows them to stay in perpetual contact with their constituents. The electorate now has instant information about what politicians have been up to.

First of all, tabloid stories are some of the richest and most important stories that we have. There's nothing wrong, per se, with tabloid stories.

Weight loss can change your whole character. That always amazed me: Shedding pounds does change your personality. It changes your philosophy of life because you recognize that you are capable of using your mind to change your body.

I found out when I was 18 that Dad had left my mother and the family before he realised he was ill and then died. When I asked Mum about it, she just sort of shrugged it off and said she'd thought I knew about it all along. Of course I hadn't, though I'm sure she must have been desperately unhappy at the time.

When things change inside you, things change around you.

In life, there is no such thing as impossible; it’s always possible.

I have always seen cold and controlled men as the right ones for me.

There's a kind of dream that movies sell to people: You can start as the lowliest person and rise to the top. 'Hit Me' doesn't sell this fantasy.

If you watch 'E.T.' and say that there are holes in the story because this alien lands, then don't go to the movie! It drives me insane.

When Beverly and I got together in 1992, and I moved to be with her in the little round house she'd built in the middle of 20 acres of woods near Amity, I found myself immersed in a natural setting that I responded to with all my being.

In my case, the listener is often in an automobile driving to work. You can concentrate on the road while still getting an audio message that can be riveting.

I've always been around dudes and sports.