There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

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

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

And one more thing.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

So many writers don’t like to write… I like to write, and sometimes I’m afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don’t want to leave it. And as a result, I’ll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.

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.

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

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

History should be written as philosophy.

I’m not a god – I do bad things.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

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

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

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

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

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.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

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.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

Naturally, my stories are about women – I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by ‚feminist.‘ In the beginning, I used to say, ‚Well, of course I’m a feminist.‘ But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.