I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

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

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.

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.

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

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

I’m a writer first and a singer second.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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.

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

I’m not a playwright.

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

My father was grounded, a very meat-and-potatoes man. He was a baker.

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

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

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.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

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.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Some critics will write ‚Maya Angelou is a natural writer‘ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, ‚I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.‘

I always liked characters that were more grounded in reality.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

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.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

I don’t go around thinking I’m Ray Bradbury all the time.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese, and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

I am not a consecutive writer.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

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

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I don’t generally read a lot of fiction.

I’m a writer first and a singer second. And then I started editing my own videos when I was 17, so it’s a process I’ve been doing since I was younger.

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.

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?

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.