I am not a consecutive writer.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

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

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

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.

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.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

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.

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

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

And one more thing.

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

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

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

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

‚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.‘

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

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.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Never regret what you don’t write.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

Writing is fun – at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That’s easy to manage.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

Today, writers want to impress other writers.

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‚Automobile Magazine.‘ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.

Once I found this possibility to use Twitter and Facebook and my blog to connect to my readers, I’m going to use it, to connect to them and to share thoughts that I cannot use in the book.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

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