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

There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other.

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.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

We talk about this concept of openness and transparency as the high-level ideal that we’re moving towards at Facebook. The way that we get there is by empowering people to share and connect. The combination of those two things leads the world to become more open.

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

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

Many people in this world are still so identified with every thought that arises in their head. There is not the slightest space of awareness there.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

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

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter’s school fees.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, ‚No. No, I’m finished. Bye.‘ And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

If you want to get each individual’s honest opinion, you don’t want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

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

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.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

I write all my sermons.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Good ideas are free – or at least they should be.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

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

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

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.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

Debates, I hate.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

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 go to sleep thinking about my kids being spoiled and I wake up thinking about it.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.