I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

I’m not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

The most successful politician is he who says what the people are thinking most often in the loudest voice.

Occasionally I’ve seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings.

He who talks more is sooner exhausted.

Some animals utter a loud cry. Some are silent, and others have a voice, which in some cases may be expressed by a word; in others, it cannot. There are also noisy animals and silent animals, musical and unmusical kinds, but they are mostly noisy about the breeding season.

I have made the mistaken assumption – and I will attempt to be better at this – of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season. And that is my mistake.

People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don’t know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.

The second time around, I’ll understand that, as a husband, my wife doesn’t care about my opinions. I just need to tell her the things that will continue to help me stack the brownie points.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it’s actually a being. ‚Harry Potter“s a good example. So Harry’s the hero, right. But he’s tainted with evil. There’s a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well balanced.

To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That’s why I don’t listen to anything that’s anonymous. But it’s hard; when there’s something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

You can stroke people with words.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent.

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

My shows are not narratives.

There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn’t return. I’ve shared the pain of families who’ve lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who’ve lost their jobs.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

I think, a lot of times when you meet someone, you feel like you need to appear like you’re not interested in them so that they’ll be more interested in you. But what happens when you start showing him that you actually like him? What’s he gonna do then? Play the tape forward; how do you keep a guy like that? I don’t want to sign up for that.

I’ve been around longer than most of my fans have been alive.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

It was always a plan that we were going to have a retail side with what were doing musically, like an Apple store or Nike Town. I wanted something where you can come get everything – ‚Marathon‘ or ‚All Money‘ or ‚Crenshaw‘ – and make it like an experience. Especially with what Crenshaw and Slauson meant to my story.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say ‚LOL.‘ Just what? But it means ‚laugh.‘ Why don’t you just laugh? What are you doing?

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

People are very reluctant to talk about their private lives but then you go to the internet and they’re much more open.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.

Nobody’s ever said that pins are a tool of diplomacy.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.