I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

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.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

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 have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

Writing bores me so.

History should be written as philosophy.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

I like being a writer.

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

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

I love sleep; it’s my favorite.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

I am the freest author in the world.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

I am not a consecutive writer.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

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

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

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.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

I am a fan of the ‚Rocky‘ films, and ‚Rocky 4‘ is my favourite. I also like ‚The Warriors.‘

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

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.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

The Joker is my favorite villain of all time: You don’t know his past; you just know what his plans are.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

You can stroke people with words.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.