I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you’d quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.

When you’re a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don’t actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work, the first thing I’ll do, and especially when I’m in New York, I’ll go for a run. And I’ll run 10 or 15k on my – and I run to gain my appetite.

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.

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

Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I’m not an improv guy. I’m a writer-guy who presents what he’s written.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.

I like being a writer.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.

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

Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.

I’m very serious about no alcohol, no drugs. Life is too beautiful.

Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.

For a creative writer possession of the ‚truth‘ is less important than emotional sincerity.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

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.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

I have to be on such a strict diet constantly.

It’s crazy how fast you get out of shape if you miss a couple days of action.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

I do the same exercises I did 50 years ago and they still work. I eat the same food I ate 50 years ago and it still works.

The writer must be a participant in the scene… like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

I love movement. I love moshing.

It takes me about two hours to run into Target. People always want a picture. They hem and haw, and they can’t spit the words out, so they waste about five minutes of my time just standing there getting ready for a picture. Just do it!

Never order food in excess of your body weight.

I’m not a playwright.

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

I have tennis shoes with little rhinestones that I slip on if I exercise. But I always wear heels, even around the house. I’m such a short little thing, I can’t reach my kitchen cabinets.

I used to run a full marathon in three hours and 25 or 26 minutes. Not any more.

For me, there have been times when an action movie, even a ‚Tomb Raider,‘ has helped me get out of myself and be physical again. It’s like therapy.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

For different roles, my condition and training and diet does alter. Depending on the role, it will really dictate the type of training I do.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Training gives us an outlet for suppressed energies created by stress and thus tones the spirit just as exercise conditions the body.

I’ve run the Boston Marathon 6 times before. I think the best aspects of the marathon are the beautiful changes of the scenery along the route and the warmth of the people’s support. I feel happier every time I enter this marathon.

I think for my bones and my size, I better stay with my 60 kilo.

Mindfulness practices enhance the connection between our body, our mind and everything else that is around us. Mindful living is the key to understanding our struggles with weight and to empowering us to control our weight.

If you appear in the ‚Atlantic‘ or ‚Harper’s‘ or the ‚New Yorker,‘ by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

Part of my daily regime is my glucosamine and, of course, a multitude of multivitamins. Branched-chain amino acids, glutamine, of course protein. I have one protein shake a day, and that is immediately after my training.

Apart from the fact that any hardy exercise conduces much to the training and formation of a soldier, pig-sticking tends to give a man what is called a ‚stalker’s eye,‘ but which, par excellence, is the soldier’s eye.

The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

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.

My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool.

Jiu Jitsu is a great workout both mentally and physically. You want to be strong for it and flexible for it.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

I worked out a lot before I was 20. I was hard underneath. I had just a little padding. I was quilted. Always Chanel.

Now I think that going to the gym is the best drug. I go four times a week and it gives me the buzz I need.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

My father was a swim teacher. We used to swim before school, swim after school.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer… in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

My rule is to break one sweat a day.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.