I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

Lena Waithe won an Emmy for writing while starring on the Netflix show ‚Master of None,‘ but it might be more accurate to call her a Master of Everything.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

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

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

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

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

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

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

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 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.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

History should be written as philosophy.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

The Spanish Empire eventually collapsed because of its expensive taste for warfare and conquest.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

London is a roost for every bird.

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

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

If you look at the history of Notre Dame, if you hire a coach who’s been successful at another college program, they’re going to be ultra successful at Notre Dame because the talent will always be there.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‚among the most unspeakable crimes in history.‘ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

I write all of my own speeches.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

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

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.