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.

I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

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

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I’m not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

I’ve always had a problem with the average macho man – they’ve always been a threat to me.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

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.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

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

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

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

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

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

Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

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.

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

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

I’m a free spirit.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

My body is quite tiny, but a lot of the emotions I feel are pretty explosive. They have to come out.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

All that self-expression has just created a generation of morons, hooked on an endless appetite for rubbish.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Love possesses not nor will it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

I’d always tried to resist playing the supervirility thing. I liked showing the vulnerability of age.