Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

You do get certain publications in the States where, if things don’t go according to plan, they flip the story and it becomes very negative.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

The first thing I look forward to when I am in Delhi is to spend some time with my family. It’s always lovely coming back here and playing in front of my own people. It’s just a special place.

I usually don’t like to ‚spoon feed‘ my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

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

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

It’s very difficult to read a book on your computer.

I now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it’s like therapy for me.

I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

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 for hobbies, I don’t really read or watch TV.

Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

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

I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‚If wet, in the library.‘ Who could say that this is bad?