‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

I think that’s why I put my energy into making music. That’s how I get my thoughts out, instead of being crazy all the time.

You see things; and you say ‚Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‚Why not?‘

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

I used to pretend that my Peugeot driving to the gym in the rain in Dublin was a Ferrari on the Vegas strip.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

I spend a lot of time reading.

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

I’ve got incredible support from my wife and family and people around me. I’ve got great people around me who handle anything on the outside, business-wise, who help free me up to create in my job.

You do get certain publications in the States where, if things don’t go according to plan, they flip the story and it becomes very negative.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

When asked, ‚How do you write?‘ I invariably answer, ‚one word at a time.‘

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

I create stars.

Art is the proper task of life.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

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

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.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I’m a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there’s very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in ‚I Shall Wear Midnight,‘ which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they’re practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don’t fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

A record deal doesn’t make you an artist; you make yourself an artist.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

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.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.