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.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Black literature is taught as sociology as tolerance not as a serious rigorous art form.

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.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art thinking that except for their tremendous gardens that the English are not primarily visual artists and are in nearly unsurpassable ways literary.

Oh literature oh the glorious Art how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us and chucks us aside. Alas!

When science art literature and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible which can make a man's name live for thousands of years.

The sinews of art and literature like those of war are money.

The web then or the pattern a web at once sensuous and logical an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style that is the foundation of the art of literature.

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.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

Every man's work whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else is always a portrait of himself.

The greatest advances of civilization whether in architecture or painting in science and literature in industry or agriculture have never come from centralized government.

Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns.

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

I got a phone call from Fearne Cotton. It was amazing! I literally couldn't believe it. It was so cool. It was the night before I was going on her show to sing on the 'Live Lounge.' She was so lovely.

I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature how words alone can get your heart doing that.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away alone and get to work.

Luckily my husband is my business partner as well as my life partner so I never had to do the heavy lifting alone literally or figuratively.

I may be alone in this but I do sense the power of film in that movies have the ability to literally change people's minds. That's pretty powerful stuff when you consider that.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing and often paradoxically it is literature that suffers for it.

I absolutely relate to being alone in squalor trying to come up with something adequate. I relate to that and I've been known to crawl out of bed and drink out of a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.