I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

A relationship can give you a gut wrenching feeling sometimes. It’s a real emotional ride.

I come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

I think that you can love people without it being the great love.

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.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

I didn’t mean to hit the umpire with the dirt, but I did mean to hit that bastard in the stands.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It’s not academic for me.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

For me, education has never been simply a policy issue – it’s personal. Neither of my parents and hardly anyone in the neighborhood where I grew up went to college. But thanks to a lot of hard work and plenty of financial aid, I had the opportunity to attend some of the finest universities in this country.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

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

It’s fun to be hopelessly in love. It’s dangerous, but it’s fun.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

And if you’re horrible to me I’m going to write a song about you and you are not going to like it. That’s how I operate.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.

I am the freest author in the world.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

I’m a human being and I fall in love and sometimes I don’t have control of every situation.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

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

Fear is real, but so is love.

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.

The human heart is the same the world over.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

Hatred is self-punishment.

Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.

The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

I like being a writer.

I have been a youngster and I know speeches are boring.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.