I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Academic qualifications are important and so is financial education. They’re both important and schools are forgetting one of them.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

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.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

History should be written as philosophy.

I never write about the road. I never write about hotels or anything like that.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.

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.

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.

People like to hear the word ‚love.‘

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

My daughter doesn’t even get my humor. She’s like, ‚Um, no. I don’t get it, Dad. Mmm, no, not that one, Dad.‘

Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.

Kids are watching us. I experience it every single day. They hang on my every word, what I wear, what I say.

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.

I’m a very strong believer in listening and learning from others.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

The mark of a true politician is that he is never at a loss for words because he is always half-expecting to be asked to make a speech.

When I’m really interested in something, I get superfocused on that. And I can spend hours upon hours not getting tired of reading about it and still be interested to learn more about it.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

The most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.

You have to be careful about how much you reveal to people that look up to you so much.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

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

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.

Ever since I was a kid, this was all I wanted to do. I’ve wanted to do music. I wanted to sing. It’s all I know.

Always be sincere, even if you don’t mean it.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

We think when God speaks to us, there’s going to be a boom out of Heaven or we’re going to get some chill bumps, but I really believe God’s talking to us all the time. He’s talking to us right in here. I call it our heart, our conscience, but it’s the Holy Spirit talking to us.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

I always keep my guard up with guys and I guess that can get in the way sometimes. I can make them go through hell.

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

I have a memory, and I can just eliminate mistakes when they come up because I’ve already made them.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing ‚Happy Birthday.‘

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.

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

In karting, you turn up and drive, look at the data and go home. But I like doing more, learning about the engines and how to make them go even better.

Doubt grows with knowledge.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‚Did you sleep good?‘ I said ‚No, I made a few mistakes.‘