I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there’s the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn’t do it the way somebody told you to do it.

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.

All of my writing is God-given.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

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.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

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

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

A person who is truly authentic doesn’t need to play a role in life, we think, but can simply be him – or herself.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

Although I’m only fourteen, I know quite well what I want. I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child. I feel quite independent of anyone.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

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

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

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

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn’t, then why would you say I am.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

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.

I have the space and liberty to create.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that – that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

Key is never be afraid of being yourself. Never!

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

I’m not a person who defends myself very often. I kind of let my actions speak for me.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.

There’s something which impels us to show our inner souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.

I write all of my own speeches.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

I have always been that girl in the back who doesn’t say anything.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.