I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

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.

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

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

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 can never say ‚why‘ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‚how‘ and ‚when‘ and ‚what.‘ But ‚why‘ is impenetrable to me.

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 do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

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?

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‚Calculus for the Practical Man.‘ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.

You fail only if you stop writing.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

Naturally, my stories are about women – I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by ‚feminist.‘ In the beginning, I used to say, ‚Well, of course I’m a feminist.‘ But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Solitude is independence.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

I do not recognize the right of the public to break in the front door of a man’s private life in order to satisfy the gaze of the curious… I do not think it right to dissect living men even for the advancement of science. So far as I am concerned, I prefer a post mortem examination to vivisection without anaesthetics.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

I am in my own head most of the time.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives… inside ourselves.