I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called ‚The Truth‘.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

The major networks, the cable networks, they’re being prosecutors. They’re judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c’mon, that’s ridiculous. But they’re doing it.

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.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

The object of the superior man is truth.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

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

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

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

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

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

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 never expected any sort of success with ‚Mockingbird’… I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

I can’t think in terms of journalism without thinking in terms of political ends. Unless there’s been a reaction, there’s been no journalism. It’s cause and effect.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

If you can talk, you can write.

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.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

The truth doesn’t hurt unless it ought to.

I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

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.

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Good writing is like a windowpane.

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.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long.

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

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

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.

For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn’t happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

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.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

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.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.