A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

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.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Don’t think in the morning. That’s a big mistake that people make. They wake up in the morning and they start thinking. Don’t think. Just execute the plan. The plan is the alarm clock goes off, you get up, you go work out. Get some.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

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.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Good executives never put off until tomorrow what they can get someone else to do today.

Either you run the day or the day runs you.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

My enthusiasm seems to cause my world to endlessly offer me cooperative, co-creating experiences. I’m willing and I’m eager, and not just about my writing – I feel the same way about staying in shape, enjoying my family, giving a lecture, or whatever it may be.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder how much more successful I would have been as a coach had it not been for my spending summers on the golf course. I could have watched more film, that’s for sure. One advantage Joe Paterno had over me was that he didn’t play golf.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.

I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

I’m a workin‘ girl.

What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

To help a friend in need is easy, but to give him your time is not always opportune.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done.

One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.

In 2013, the week before I dropped ‚Crenshaw,‘ ‚Complex‘ wrote an article that said that Nipsey Hussle is one of the top 25 underperforming artists. I was so offended that I responded with my own opinion about these journalists – their point of view is not validated in our culture.

Someone once asked me, ‚How long does it take to do your hair.‘ I said, ‚I don’t know, I’m never there.‘

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs forever and ever.

It is extremely difficult to say how long the process actually took to finally achieve my fragrance, Boudoir, because there was a lot of time waiting around for other people.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

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

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

Lena Waithe won an Emmy for writing while starring on the Netflix show ‚Master of None,‘ but it might be more accurate to call her a Master of Everything.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

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

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

Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and… the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.

You can stroke people with words.

One today is worth two tomorrows.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

I’m bloody awful at multi-tasking.