Excessive literary production is a social offense.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

I write all of my own speeches.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

I think that people are tired. They’re tired of the same old kind of politics. People want a new tone to politics.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

Society has made us believe you should look like an 18-year-old model all your life.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‚Gimme, gimme, gimme,‘ you will always be in short supply.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

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

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

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

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.