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.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

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.

Billy Graham is one of my great lifetime heroes. I think he epitomizes the essence of what a Christian leader should be. I have participated in some of his crusades a couple of times in Atlanta. I’ve seen the profound impact he’s had on me personally, and on other people who were not Christians and accepted Christ as Savior.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

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

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

I’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ll always write.

The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.

Anyone that’s involved in development has discovered that all the good work that’s been done in development has been undone by the AIDS emergency.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

Sometimes when you take strong stands, if you’re not called to do it, you’re dividing the audience you’re trying to reach.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

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

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

Sisters, do you realize the breadth and scope of your influence when you speak those things that come to your heart and mind as directed by the Spirit?

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

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

Reviews condition people. At the end of the day, a lot of human minds are malleable. They can be easily shaped with strong words.

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

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

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.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

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

Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.

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.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

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.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

I don’t think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.

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.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

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.

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

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

People that’s in power – the central banks, these fiat currencies that are traded globally – they got influence over the messaging and the narrative in the media.

And one more thing.

We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.

See, people are watching you. Especially your children. They’re taking in every single thing you do. They are like video cameras with legs. And they are always in the record mode. They learn more from what you do than from what you say.

I prefer the old theaters because the audience is… trapped.

Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.

Comedy’s about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you’re saying.