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

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.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

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.

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.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness.

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. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

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.

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

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.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

I write all of my own speeches.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

We just think that there are all these different ways that people want to share, and that compressing them all into a single blue app is not the right format of the future.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

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

A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

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

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top – I’m afraid that’s not quite right.

I write all my sermons.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.

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 wanted to write.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

It’s rare for anyone to value the opinions of a teenage girl.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

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

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

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

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

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Truth is a deep kindness that teaches us to be content in our everyday life and share with the people the same happiness.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

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

I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

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.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.

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

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.