Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Everything we touch in our daily lives, including our body, is a miracle. By putting the kingdom of god in the right place, it shows us it is possible to live happily right here, right now.

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.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

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.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work you believe in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you will find happiness that you had thought could never be yours.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best.

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

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

My faith helps me understand that circumstances don’t dictate my happiness, my inner peace.

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

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

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

Those movies sure got me into a rut.

I would always want printed books.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

I won’t be happy until we have every boy in America between the ages of six and sixteen wearing a glove and swinging a bat.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

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.

A word after a word after a word is power.

I wanted to write.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.

I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

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

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

You can’t be happy by doing something groovy.

I dote on his very absence.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading.

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

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.