At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

The tablet is not mainstream. Reading off the screen is not mainstream.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

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

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

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.

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

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

I read poetry to save time.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

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

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

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 of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

I was saving the name of ‚Geisel‘ for the Great American Novel.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

I write all my sermons.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

I grew up reading science fiction.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

I write all of my own speeches.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

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

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

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

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.