The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel.

I write all of my own speeches.

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

When I was a kid, I thought movies just came from air. I thought they just appeared.

Everyone who wills can hear the inner voice. It is within everyone.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited ‚first chapters‘. I have indeed written many.

Never regret what you don’t write.

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.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

The biggest guru-mantra is: never share your secrets with anybody. It will destroy you.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

My grandmother used to embarrass me more, when she would pick me up from school wearing a big fuzzy hat. I didn’t like that.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

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.

I have only one counsel for you – be master.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

The unassuming youth seeking instruction with humility gains good fortune.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.

The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day. The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win – you pass the test.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

The question isn’t, ‚What do we want to know about people?‘, It’s, ‚What do people want to tell about themselves?‘

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man’s estate, is the gift of education.

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.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.

I do believe in self-help.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

I was born in Earl K. Long Hospital. I was born Feb. 5th, 1986. I have a lot of family members. My grandmother had five girls, and all of them had children. It was always a house full. A lot of cousins. A lot of family members.

Before you start a goal – let’s take care of our insecurities because they are going to surface when you put yourself in the crucible and you’re suffering.

I don’t think I am evangelical in my work.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

That’s the biggest gift I can give anybody: ‚Wake up, be aware of who you are, what you’re doing and what you can do to prevent yourself from becoming ill.‘

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.

It’s honestly true that money means nothing to me.

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

I break ground. I trailblaze.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Whenever you give up something, you must replace it with something.

Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.