For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn’t sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours‘ writing. Nothing.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

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.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

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.

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

A letter does not blush.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

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.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they’re rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

I’ve got a very interesting background.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

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.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

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

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

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.