There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that’s been made from one of my books, I know that it isn’t going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I’ll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

I never dreamt, in my dream, I’m Dalai Lama.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

From the boys‘ point of view, scouting puts them into fraternity-gangs, which is their natural organisation, whether for games, mischief, or loafing; it gives them a smart dress and equipments; it appeals to their imagination and romance; and it engages them in an active, open-air life.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

I am not a fan of books.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

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.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.

Imagination rules the world.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

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

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

I don’t write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

I am completely fascinated by the differences and comparisons between real life and fairy tales because we’re raised as little girls to think that we’re a princess and that Prince Charming is going to sweep us off our feet.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

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

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

For a creative writer possession of the ‚truth‘ is less important than emotional sincerity.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

I now possess the tools as a producer and a songwriter to really just go out and make smashes all day long. I could make an album full of smash records that got pop appeal. But my heart is in hip-hop. My heart is in telling stories. And it’s like therapy for me.