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

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

My life is the road, man. I need to keep moving.

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.

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.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

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.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

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.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

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

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

If somebody crafts an interesting tweet that’ll lead me to their blog, I’m going to their blog.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

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 knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Most home teams have chapels, so when I’m on the road I’ll probably go to their services.

I once went on the most grueling radio tour. Living in hotel rooms, sleeping in the backs of rental cars as my mom drove to three different cities in one day.

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

London is a roost for every bird.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

The Indians on board said that thence to Cuba was a voyage in their canoes of a day and a half; these being small dug-outs without a sail. Such are their canoes. I departed thence for Cuba, for by the signs the Indians made of its greatness, and of its gold and pearls, I thought that it must be Cipango.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

I’ll stay in Memphis.

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

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 write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

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.

I spent more time on dark ships in danger zones than any other woman in the world.

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

Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.

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.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‚Automobile Magazine.‘ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.

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

Rebellion is what you make of it. When you’ve been on a tour bus for two months straight, and then you get in your car and drive wherever you want, that can feel rebellious.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.

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

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

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.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful; it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

There can never be any stop to learn about different cultures by travelling to different places. And whatever comes your way, continue the healthy eating habits.

Exploration by real people inspires us.

You can stroke people with words.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

I’ve been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

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

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.

Once I found this possibility to use Twitter and Facebook and my blog to connect to my readers, I’m going to use it, to connect to them and to share thoughts that I cannot use in the book.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.