Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

I always try to be myself. Ever since I was an introverted kid, I’d get on stage and be able to break out of my shell.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

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.

I’m telling you there is hope. I have seen it, but it does not come from the governments or corporations. It comes from the people.

Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I’m very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I’m feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It’s gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.

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?

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

I see the world in black and white, and I don’t like compromising.

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

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

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

Imagination decides everything.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.

If I’m inspired to make a certain kind of song, I’m going to make that kind of song, no matter if it’s what they know me as or think I am.

The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.