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

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

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

Writing bores me so.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

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

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

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

I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

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

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

You can stroke people with words.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

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.

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

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.

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

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

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

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.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

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

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

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

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.

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

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

I wanted to write.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

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.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.