I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.

Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

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.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

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

After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the ‚sense of utter irresponsibility‘ shown by the demonstrators.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God… They’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired.

Oh, that lovely title, ex-president.

Although I’m only fourteen, I know quite well what I want. I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child. I feel quite independent of anyone.

I always wanted to be loved.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

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

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Especially when you’re at a high level in an organization, criticism can be devastating to an employee. I prefer to praise employees for what they’re doing right, and it tends to lead to them doing more of the same. Not always, but it’s the way I choose to bet.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‚Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.‘

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, ‚Of course they like it. They should like it.‘

For greed all nature is too little.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

The President is always abused. If he isn’t, he isn’t doing anything.

The one thing that ‚Via Dolorosa‘ has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.

Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.

However happy people say they are, nobody is satisfied: we always have to be with the prettiest woman, buy a bigger house, change cars, desire what we do not have.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

‚The Lorax‘ book was intended to be propaganda.

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

What ‚multiculturalism‘ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

There is a group of people that I think in good faith honestly believe that further curtailing our Second Amendment rights will enhance public safety. But there’s another group that just hates the Second Amendment.

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

And, honestly, if somebody wants to criticize me for not being a trainwreck, that’s fine with me!

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

I don’t see myself as beautiful, because I can see a lot of flaws. People have really odd opinions. They tell me I’m skinny, as if that’s supposed to make me happy.

The starting point of all achievement is desire.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.