I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

If it weren’t for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

I always dreamt of holding the bat and winning games for India. That was my inspiration to take up cricket.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

I believe in Coach Louis Wong. He is so much more than just a football coach.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

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

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

I wanted to write.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels.

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

Originality is really important.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

If you are born an artist, you have no choice but to fight to stay an artist.

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.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

My dear sisters, whatever your calling, whatever your circumstances, we need your impressions, your insights, and your inspiration. We need you to speak up and speak out in ward and stake councils.

There ought to be an artistic depot where the artist need only hand in his artwork in order to receive what he asks for. As things are, one must be half a business man, and how can one understand – good heavens! – that’s what I really call troublesome.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

I’ve been asking myself: ‚Why put together these things – CDs, albums?‘ The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists‘ part.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

If you want to shine like a sun, first burn like a sun.