I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

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.

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.

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

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

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

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.

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

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

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

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

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.

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

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

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

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

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.

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

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

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 began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

I write all of my own speeches.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

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.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

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

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

I am not a consecutive writer.

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

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

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

Believe it or not, I make myself laugh. Sometimes when I have thoughts or say some things that are funny, it just makes me laugh, and I don’t mind laughing at it before you guys do.

I think tattoos are horrible. It’s like living in a Pucci dress full-time.

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.

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.

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

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

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