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

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

The beauty of me being on stage is I have a voice.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

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

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

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

I work with my brother Finneas, and he produces all of my music in his little bedroom in our house. We actually tried renting out a studio for a month when we were producing ‚Don’t Smile at Me,‘ but it was really hard there, and we ended up just doing it at home anyway.

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.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

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.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

I don’t have anything to say about other people’s art and their work.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

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.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

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

There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn’t mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they’re happy if they do get it.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

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.

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

‚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.

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.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

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.

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

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

I don’t do research. I never have.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

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

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.

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

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

Language is the dress of thought.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

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

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

I didn’t have to win, and winning wasn’t important to me. Being world champion wasn’t important to me. What was important to me was entertaining the audience, and whether that meant winning, losing, singing, or whatever it was on the live show we were doing every week, which was awesome, I was game for it.

Any time we are misused or used for a purpose other than what God intended us for, it’s damaging.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

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.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?