A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

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.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

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.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

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

Writing bores me so.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

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

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

I start each book when it’s ready and never before.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

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

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

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

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.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

I like being a writer.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

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

To the man who reads ‚Scouting for Boys‘ superficially, there is a disappointing lack of religion in the book. But to him who tries it in practice, the basic religion underlying it soon becomes apparent.

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

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.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

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.‘

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

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‘?

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.