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

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

I like to change characters and then, slowly I believe the audience treat me as, like an actor who can fight. It’s not like an action star.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

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

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

The best football is always about expression of emotion. Always.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

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 don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

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.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

I have certain signatures, certain cutting principles. It could be a raw-edged seam; it could be leaving the lining of sheepskin exposed so it’s not perfectly finished. I invent new ways to do it, but the end goal is always the same.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

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

I love, love, love just being hands on at all times in the studio.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

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.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

I wanted to write.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

I just make the pictures and where they fall is where they fall. If somebody likes them, that’s always nice. And if they don’t like them, then too bad.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

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

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 can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

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.

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

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

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

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

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.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.