A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

I don’t usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this ‚hopey changey stuff,‘ she was right: there was nothing there.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

The last person I have ever criticized is an official. They have a tough job to do. Things are happening so quick.

It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

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.

My focus is my art, and that’s what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I’ve turned down many things that I just didn’t believe in.

A witty saying proves nothing.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Industry need not wish.

I believe in sketching because there is something very sensitive in sketching, you know, in sketches that you don’t have out of a computer that looks the same like everybody even if, later on, the dresses are OK, but I like to sketch, and I like to see trails made after my sketches that look the same. It is you know, what I like.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.

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.

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.

I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

There are two bowlers who I think are very tough to play against – Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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

The problem with Yanks is they are wimps.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

I’m not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose… it’ll be much harder to detect.

Especially when you’re at a high level in an organization, criticism can be devastating to an employee. I prefer to praise employees for what they’re doing right, and it tends to lead to them doing more of the same. Not always, but it’s the way I choose to bet.

If the experiments which I urge be defective, it cannot be difficult to show the defects; but if valid, then by proving the theory, they must render all objections invalid.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

Religion can be the enemy of God. It’s often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

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

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

The whole aspect of cinema and film festivals should be a moment to come together and celebrate art and humanity. It would be a shame if there was such a divide.

The spread of online information isn’t just good for charities. It’s also good for donors. You can go to a site like Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits on their financial health as well as the amount of information they share about their work.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

The very phrase ‚foreign affairs‘ makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

I don’t have stylistic loyalty. That’s why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

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.

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.

When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like ‚Bird,‘ I use 90% black people.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.