Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

History should be written as philosophy.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‚I could have thought of that‘ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

All of my writing is God-given.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

If I weren’t performing, I’d be a beauty editor or a therapist. I love creativity, but I also love to help others. My mother was a hairstylist, and they listen to everyone’s problems – like a beauty therapist!

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

I write all my sermons.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

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

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

You don’t have to be scared of me, because I am loyal. Why are people so scared of creative ideas and so scared of truth? All I want to do is do good.

The lie is a condition of life.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

A lot of people are afraid to tell the truth, to say no. That’s where toughness comes into play. Toughness is not being a bully. It’s having backbone.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I’m honored that everybody’s inspired off my inspiration.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

I like the idea of working in different genres and transcending genres and hopefully finding success, and ultimately make movies people like.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.