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

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

History should be written as philosophy.

This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

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

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

I wanted to write.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

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.

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

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

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

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

I am the freest author in the world.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited ‚first chapters‘. I have indeed written many.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ‚mature‘ critics often are.

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

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

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‘.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

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.

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 think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

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.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Someone did a graphic of me in my jersey, and Jordan, they dubbed him guarding me, and Kanye’s face was on both of us. That’s my favorite meme of all time – or so far to-date. I’m gonna have to get that blown up on my wall or something.

I am not a consecutive writer.

I write all of my own speeches.