I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

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.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

I don’t have all the answers.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

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

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

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

Success isn’t supposed to happen, no matter how hard you work. There’s no guarantee you’re going to succeed. There’s nothing set in stone.

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

You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

I put out tapes, but I always kept saying, ‚Why am I putting all this energy into these tapes?‘ I was like, ‚I’d rather make just an album because I have a vision; I know how I want to do my records.‘ I always felt like an artist as well.

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

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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

It’s no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

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.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

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.

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

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

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

I felt like I had a really bad case of writer’s block… Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can’t get it out, I start feeling bad about myself – a lot of self-loathing.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

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

I don’t think you ever really know what all you’re doing, so you have to act on faith.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

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

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.

Life is anything but predictable.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

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

If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

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.

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

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

I really want to love somebody. I do. I just don’t know if it’s possible forever and ever.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

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.

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

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

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.