Each book I’ve done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

I love soccer, love tennis… Roger Federer has been a favourite for a long, long time. The kind of consistency he has shown, 16 Grand Slam titles… The way he handles himself in pressure situations is admirable… He is so calm… In soccer, I’m a huge fan of Barcelona… I like watching Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and David Villa.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

I start each book when it’s ready and never before.

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

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

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’ve never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

I can say that out of 365 days, I manage to do yoga on at least 300 days.

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

I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don’t really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be, and I really like that, too, so it depends. I’ve always had more than one thing going.

I talk to my readers on social networking sites, but I never tell them what the book is about. Writing is lonely, so from time to time I talk to them on the Internet. It’s like chatting at a bar without leaving your office. I talk with them about a lot of things other than my books.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

It’s like a muscle – if you stop going to the gym or stop running, you get weak. The military teaches you these great values, but we don’t keep up the discipline on our own, and we lose it. So wherever you go, keep that discipline up.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

I do the same exercises I did 50 years ago and they still work. I eat the same food I ate 50 years ago and it still works.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‚Read,‘ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‚Don’t read, don’t think, just write,‘ and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.

I can’t very well be teaching one way and living my life another way. What I do in life must be consistent with the things I say. And the same goes for you.

I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.

One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.

I only change things where I know about a situation. I’d never change just for change.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

I do my job like I breathe.

It’s crazy how fast you get out of shape if you miss a couple days of action.

The only thing is, people have to develop courage. It is most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtues consistently.

We become what we repeatedly do.

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Anybody with ability can play in the big leagues. But to be able to trick people year in and year out the way I did, I think that was a much greater feat.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

I don’t even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like, ‚Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do‘.

I want to consistently play well and win titles. I’m only at the beginning.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit.

To be successful, you need results in a row. You can’t win, lose, win, lose.

I don’t want to be something that just comes and goes.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

I write the paragraph, then I’m crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it’s almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

Integrity means that you are the same in public as you are in private.

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.