I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

I like a drama.

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

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

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 stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

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.

The future of American film lies on television.

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.

A lot of people think I’m a comedian.

When I put out ‚Video Games‘ in May 2011, it was a 5:25-minute love song; I was surprised when a lot of people said they were listening to it. I was surprised when it went to the radio, without me even knowing how something like that even happens!

I knew early on that I wanted to entertain in some form. And I knew I would work as hard as anyone to do it.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

Books are alive, you see. They’re not dead, they’re alive.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

Stand-up is my baby.

Libraries raised me.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

The truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation, so make your words count.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

I know some of the best Dolly Parton jokes. I made ‚em up myself.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.

I like the good life too much, I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

Radio in England is nonexistent. It’s very bad English use of a media system, typically English use.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

I spend a lot of time reading.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

I didn’t play with other children.

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.

I’m so nervous. I’ve always been nervous, ever since I was a kid.

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

I had a really good childhood up until I was nine, then a classic case of divorce really affected me.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

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 was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‚Wind in the Willows‘ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‚The Wind in the Willows.‘

I didn’t have a father figure in the house.

I love making people laugh. And I love laughing.

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

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.