And one more thing.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

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

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

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.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can’t really measure degrees of difficulty.

My proposal happens to be very mainstream.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

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

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

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.

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.

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

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

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

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

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

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

I write all of my own speeches.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn’t happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

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

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

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

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

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

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

‚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.‘

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.