If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

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.

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

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

Imagination decides everything.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

I am in the world feeling my way to light ‚amid the encircling gloom.‘

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

I believe that one person can make a difference.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

I have a message to give to the world, and I shall not be thwarted.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

God wants to use you to make other people happy! And the happier you make others, the happier you will be because you reap what you sow.

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Music is really driving my whole life.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

I am an example of what is possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by people around them. I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life who taught me about quiet strength and dignity.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

Passions are the gales of life.

I’ve just always been a reader.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

In no instance have… the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

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.

Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I take inspiration from everyone and everything. I’m inspired by current champions, former champions, true competitors, people dedicated to their dream, hard workers, dreamers, believers, achievers.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.

In 1995, I was diagnosed with cancer, and I had to practice what I preached. I had always said to ‚believe in God‘ and ‚don’t give up‘ to little kids who had been diagnosed with cancer. I then thought if I can’t call on that same God and same strength that I told people about, I would be a liar and a phony.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, ‚Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.‘

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.