I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

When you have good friends you’ve been around, every time they talk, you don’t give them your full attention. You don’t look them in the eye and stop. Half the time, you’re listening, half the time, you are ignoring them.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

I had a period in my life where I decided that I would never be bored again and that, if I had any free time at all, I would make plans, and I would always be doing things. It actually was great for a year or so, but then I lost all of my friends.

If you want to influence people, you want them to accept your suggestions, you don’t say, ‚You don’t know how to use the English language,‘ or ‚How could you make that argument?‘ It will be welcomed much more if you have a gentle touch than if you are aggressive.

I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.

When you have two busy kids running around the house, returning e-mails is a task, let alone surfing the web.

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

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

I meet people overseas that know five languages – that the only language I’m comfortable in is English.

I just don’t have time to get old!

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

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

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

With audacity one can undertake anything, but not do everything.

If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

There was one incident at a movie theater where my girl got mad at these guys who were talking behind us. I never looked back there, but she was like, ‚Will you all just shut up!‘ And I just got up and moved three rows in front. She was like, ‚What are you doing?!‘ I was like, ‚You better get up here! I don’t play the fighting games.‘

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.

Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January.

Time is kind of an amazing thing because you can do so much with it. I think people underestimate time… I don’t want to just sit on my phone for hours.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

I didn’t just invent saying offensive things.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

Journalism largely consists of saying ‚Lord Jones is Dead‘ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter’s school fees.

He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

Disagreement is something normal.

I grew up cursing a lot. It felt natural. My parents told me to stop.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

If I have the chance to say something, I will say it – but that doesn’t obligate me to always say something, or to shed light on every problem, as if I were a lawmaker.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

I particularly like Twitter, because it’s short and can be very funny and informative. It’s a little bit like having your own radio program.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

I explain the law of compensation like this: ‚Returns are minimal in spite of massive effort at the start, yet returns can be massive with minimal effort over time.