I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

I don’t do research. I never have.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

A letter does not blush.

A word after a word after a word is power.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

All of my writing is God-given.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

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 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.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

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.

You fail only if you stop writing.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

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

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

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.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

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

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

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.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.