All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

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.

Expect me to continue what I’ve been doing, which is trying to take over the world.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

When you are aspiring to the highest place, it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

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.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I’m trying to get to Mars before everyone else.

I like pushing boundaries.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

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

If I could have worked from the time I was born until I was 18 and never had to work again, I would have done it.

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

I loved what I did. I could’ve been secretary of state for ever.

I do remember how it was to be poor. I do remember that in my early years, we had to grow and raise all of our food, even our animals. And I remember in my early life, we didn’t even have electricity. So it was very, very hard times then.

I like being a writer.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

I knew I was a winner back in the late sixties. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way – I hope it never will.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

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

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‚eternity‘; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

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

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

I think that if all kids aspire to reach a point where they could feed themselves and a few of their friends, this would be good for the world surely.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited ‚first chapters‘. I have indeed written many.

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.

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

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

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

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Often, in the real world, it’s not the smart that get ahead but the bold.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

For me the greatest source of income is still movies. Nothing – stocks, financial speculation, real estate speculation or businesses – makes more money for me than making movies.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. 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.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.