This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Politically there were failures. And also on the personal level, there were tremendous failures.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

We shouldn’t have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.

You fail only if you stop writing.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

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.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing. Today you are looking at the Taliban or ISIS; tomorrow you might be looking at another name.

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

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.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

My enthusiasm seems to cause my world to endlessly offer me cooperative, co-creating experiences. I’m willing and I’m eager, and not just about my writing – I feel the same way about staying in shape, enjoying my family, giving a lecture, or whatever it may be.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

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 wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

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

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

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.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

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.

I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

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 a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

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

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

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

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

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.