I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

I have no trouble sleeping.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

It needs time. Nobody wants to hear it, but that’s the truth: if you want to have success in the future, you have to be ready to work now.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Never regret what you don’t write.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

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 tend not to look back and dwell on a project once it is finished.

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.

There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time!

If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

My head’s never really quiet. The only time I can get it to turn off is if I watch ‚CSI‘ or ‚Law & Order,‘ where I have to follow the crime. If I can’t turn my head off during that, I know I’ve really got a problem.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.

Good executives never put off until tomorrow what they can get someone else to do today.

What one has to do usually can be done.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

Ya know what I do almost every day? I wash. Personal hygiene is part of the package with me.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

I love to put on lotion. Sometimes I’ll watch TV and go into a lotion trance for an hour. I try to find brands that don’t taste bad in case anyone wants to taste 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.

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.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

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.

The truth is, anyone can start projects. The world is full of just-started projects that looked great at the time but were never completed.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

With all the travel we’re doing to cold-weather cities, your mind definitely starts to wander. It gets you away from the game. Even when you arrive in a city, you’re tempted to just sit in your hotel and rest. Sometimes it’s nice to just get out and walk around, to see what’s there.

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.

When I’m in my 50s, I kind of think I’ll want to be in a garden.

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.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

A letter does not blush.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

Tardiness often robs us opportunity, and the dispatch of our forces.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.