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

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.

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.

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

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

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.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

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

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

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

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.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

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.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

Why there is one body in our System qualified to give light and heat to all the rest, I know no reason but because the Author of the System thought it convenient; and why there is but one body of this kind, I know no reason, but because one was sufficient to warm and enlighten all the rest.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

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

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.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

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.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

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

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

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

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

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.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

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.