Brevity is the soul of wit.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

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

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

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.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

I never expected any sort of success with ‚Mockingbird’… I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

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.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

Writing is fun – at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That’s easy to manage.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

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 really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion.

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.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

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

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

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

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

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

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

I grew up reading science fiction.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

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.

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

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

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

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

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

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

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.