Excessive literary production is a social offense.

To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

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

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

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

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

I’ve only written one science-fiction book: ‚Fahrenheit 451.‘ That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

People do not make wars; governments do.

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

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

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.

If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‚healthy‘ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations‘ economic health.

Writing bores me so.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

You fail only if you stop writing.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

The mainstream is always under attack.

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.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can’t really measure degrees of difficulty.

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

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

I think the first duty of society is justice.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone – except God.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

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

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.