I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

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 man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

First thing I do in the morning, after I have my breakfast and do my spiritual work, is put on my makeup and fix my hair, and I can do my makeup in 15 minutes.

You have to stay fresh and blank in your mind when you go out to bat. You complicate things, and you’re gone.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so.

I think the reason I don’t read is because, when I’m reading, I feel like I’m missing out on something else. You know, What are my friends doing? Where’s my girlfriend?

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

We live in a time-crunched world, and just about everything we do seems to be urgent.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

I’m a slow worker; I’m, I think, a steady worker.

Adjusting to the passage of time, I think, is a key to success and to life: just being able to roll with the punches.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Leisure is the time for doing something useful. This leisure the diligent person will obtain the lazy one never.

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

While we are postponing, life speeds by.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

Time is more value than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.

How about a little noise. How do you expect a man to putt?

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

I’m bloody awful at multi-tasking.

Lost time is never found again.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

When you begin to worry, go find something to do. Get busy being a blessing to someone; do something fruitful. Talking about your problem or sitting alone, thinking about it, does no good; it serves only to make you miserable. Above all else, remember that worrying is totally useless. Worrying will not solve your problem.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

I am results-oriented.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.