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.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

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

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

I’ve seen how the issues that come across a president’s desk are always the hard ones – the problems where no amount of data or numbers will get you to the right answer.

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.

These times are so hard, and they’re getting even harder.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

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

It’s good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that’s better than you’d imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.

We live in a bewildering world.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

I have the space and liberty to create.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

I leave the genre labeling to other people. I really do. If I were to think too hard about it, that would stifle you creatively. If you think too hard about who other people want you to be as an artist, it stops you from being who you want to be as an artist.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I wanted to write.

I would get out of school and go straight to my computer to create beats.

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

Any other woman who has to go to work and pick up the kids and make dinner – that’s way harder than what I have to do.

It just seems there’s better things to do in your life than be on television if it’s not interesting, if it’s not challenging, if it’s not fun. You know? When it stops being those things for me, I’ll stop making television.

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

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

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

History should be written as philosophy.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

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

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

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.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

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

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

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

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

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

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 get impatient with people working on a film that have their head in their hands like it’s the most complicated thing in the world.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

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.

I don’t think I could think of a single thing that’s more isolating than being famous.

I wish every American had an opportunity to sit down, to go to a base, to meet with families, to meet with service members, to sit down with our veterans – because we would think differently about our challenges as individuals.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.