I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

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.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

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

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

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.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

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

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

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.

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

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

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

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.

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

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

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

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

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.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

A letter does not blush.

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.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

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

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

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.

Someone did a graphic of me in my jersey, and Jordan, they dubbed him guarding me, and Kanye’s face was on both of us. That’s my favorite meme of all time – or so far to-date. I’m gonna have to get that blown up on my wall or something.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

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.

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.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

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

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

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I am not a consecutive writer.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

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.

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.