I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

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.

I’ve been asking myself: ‚Why put together these things – CDs, albums?‘ The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists‘ part.

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.

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

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

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

If you write in the same way over and over again, like, in the same place with the same techniques and with the same people, you’re sort of writing the same song over and over again.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

You do projects with the hope they will be big and hope they will go beyond what you imagine.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

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.

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.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

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

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‚The Hornet’s Nest,‘ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

No great thing is created suddenly.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.