I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

‚Harry Potter‘ gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

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.

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

There’s no point in making predictions. It’s not worth speculating because nothing is set in stone and things change all the time in football. Today there are opportunities that no one knows if they will come round again in the future.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

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

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

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

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

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

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.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

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

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

I write all of my own speeches.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

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.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

I don’t even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel neurotic. So it’s better for the family if I’m working.

Remember that life’s big changes rarely give advance warning.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

What’s coming will come and we’ll just have to meet it when it does.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

I never write about the road. I never write about hotels or anything like that.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

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.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

It is not scientifically possible to accurately predict the outcome of an action. To suggest otherwise runs contrary to historical experience and the nature of war.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.