Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

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.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

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

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

I put cocoa butter all over my face and my iconic belly and my arms and legs. Why live rough? Live smooth.

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

Africa is probably one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

No one person controls Microsoft. The board and the shareholders decide whether they want to have me as CEO.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

I’ll never graduate from collagen.

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.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

The issues that cross a president’s desk are never easy. The easy questions don’t even get to the president.

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

The Premier League is one of the most difficult in the world. There’s five, six, or seven clubs that can be the champions. Only one can win, and all the others are disappointed and live in the middle of disaster.

Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.

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.

It take many a year, mon, and maybe some bloodshed must be, but righteousness someday prevail.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.

I’ve seen how the issues that come across a president’s desk are always the hard ones – the problems where no amount of data or numbers will get you to the right answer.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

The last thing I wanted to do was to be a wartime President.

I think women want to take care of themselves, and I think having a voice in how that is done is very important.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends.

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

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.

I’m for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.

Wise men don’t need advice. Fools won’t take it.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

The idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

We spend so much time sublimatin‘, thinkin‘ about, ‚What am I going to have for lunch, dinner?‘

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

Fortunately we’re not a public company – we’re a private group of companies, and I can do what I want.