I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

I learned, when I look in the mirror and tell my story, that I should be myself and not peep whatever everybody is doing.

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think – or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

You can be happy where you are.

Loving someone liberates the lover as well as the beloved. And that kind of love comes with age.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

I am who I am today because of my mother.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Transformation literally means going beyond your form.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

I realized the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam.

When I was young, I could not imagine being old. My mother said, and the doctor confirmed, that I had an unusual amount of energy; and it followed me into young adulthood.

If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

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.

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.

I can’t jump the highest. I’m obviously not the biggest, not the strongest.

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

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

If you’re embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn’t include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

You know, most people really don’t know me.

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.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Why regret anything? Where does it get you to regret anything you’ve ever done in your life? It gets you nowhere. It’s a pathetic emotion that you can wallow in.

A shady business never yields a sunny life.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

I’m very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me. I’m rather surprised at who I am, because I’m actually like my dad!

I think I’ve got wiser.

I think a big test we all face in life on a regular basis is that discouragement test. Life’s not always fair, but I believe if you keep doing the right thing, God will get you to where you are.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

I always wanted a family.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

Prejudice is a chain, it can hold you. If you prejudice, you can’t move, you keep prejudice for years. Never get nowhere with that.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

I know I’m a good professional, I know that no one’s harder on me than myself and that’s never going to change, under any circumstances.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.