As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

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

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, ‚No. No, I’m finished. Bye.‘ And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

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

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

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

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

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.

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.

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.

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

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

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

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

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.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

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

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

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’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.

If you can talk, you can write.

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

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

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.

My enthusiasm seems to cause my world to endlessly offer me cooperative, co-creating experiences. I’m willing and I’m eager, and not just about my writing – I feel the same way about staying in shape, enjoying my family, giving a lecture, or whatever it may be.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

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.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

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.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

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

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

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.

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

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.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.