I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called ‚The Truth‘.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

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.

As long as the people don’t fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn’t stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful… but so frightening.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

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

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

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

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

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’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

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. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

I’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ll always write.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

I am a humble but very earnest seeker after truth.

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

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

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.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

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

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

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.

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.

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

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring… ‚How to Build a Boat.‘

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

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

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

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 might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

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.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.