All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

When I see myself as an old woman, I just think about being happy. And hopefully, I’ll still be fly.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

There’s a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What’s the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it’s exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That’s really cool. That’s the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.

I spend a lot of time balancing between faith and disbelief.

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.

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

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

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.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

I’m all about evolution. I’m the first person to judge myself.

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.

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.

When it comes to our everyday habits, it’s important to ask: ‚Am I putting God first?‘

If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others.

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.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

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

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

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.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Instead of blaming everyone and everything else for your problems, pray for God to help you take an inventory of what’s been on your mind so you can think about what you’ve been thinking about.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

What nourishes me also destroys me.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

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

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

I let the American people down.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.