Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

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 soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

Whatever came to mind, whatever came to hand, I would read.

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.

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.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats – maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats – but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

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.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

You fail only if you stop writing.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

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

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?

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

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

A home without books is a body without soul.

I have so many designs and video ideas and lyrics in my head, so I always try to be productive.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

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

I’ve loved reading all my life.

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.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.