When I write, I try to become different characters.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

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.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

On ‚Think Like a Man,‘ they got the best out of me because they allowed me to bring my own cadences and opinions to the character that I was playing. I think we got the best of that particular character.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn’t allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn’t do anything with my classmates.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

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.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

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.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

There are thousands of boys being wasted daily to our country through being left to become characterless, and, therefore, useless wasters, a misery to themselves and an eyesore and a danger to the nation. They could be saved if only the right surroundings or environment were given to them at the receptive time of their lives.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

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.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.