I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run. Win through your actions, not your words.

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

I don’t have anything to hide.

Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.

Seeing is not always believing.

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

Prayer is such a basic foundation of a Christian’s relationship with God. It’s how we communicate and fellowship with Him. But a surprising number of people, young and old, new and even long-time Christians, say they’re not satisfied with their prayer life.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

If I have something to say, I want it to be meaningful.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

Words are more powerful than some noises. Noises won’t last long. Lyrics are so important, and people don’t realise that.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

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

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

We live in an image society. Speeches are not what anybody cares about; what they care about is the picture.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

In this experiment, made on the 9th of October, 1876, actual conversation, backwards and forwards, upon the same line, and by the same instruments reciprocally used, was successfully carried on for the first time upon a real line of miles in length.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

I didn’t just invent saying offensive things.

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

My friend has a baby. I’m recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.

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.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

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.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

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

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Next time I see you, remind me not to talk to you.

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‚Blah, blah, blah.‘ That’s when I get crazy.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

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.

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.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.