If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

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

My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that’s not so bad; but New York City?

Friends are thieves of time.

Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.

A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

Keeping score is for games, not friendships.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

To help a friend in need is easy, but to give him your time is not always opportune.

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.

Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.

My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.

Never injure a friend, even in jest.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.

I am who I am and I say what I think. I’m not putting a face on for the record.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Why is it so hard for people to believe that white people are poor?! I wouldn’t say I lived in a ghetto; I’d say I lived in the ‚hood. The same friends I had back then are the same people on tour with me now.

I’m actually a very honest person, and sometimes I end up like, ‚Man, I said too much.‘ It’s hard for me not to tell the truth when you ask me.

The only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: ‚I’ll buy a million dollars‘ worth of love.‘ But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

The secret to a long marriage is to stay gone.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

When people say ‚marriage‘ to me… It’s always a means to an end. Everyone’s so in a rush to define the relationship.

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

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

It’s very important for Christians to be honest with God, which often, you know, God is much more interested in who you are than who you want to be.

Marriage is this grand madness, and I think if people knew that, they would perhaps take it more seriously.

I think one of the basic reasons men make good friends is that they can make up their minds quickly.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.

I think what’s important is for us to decipher what is honest and what is dishonest and be accepting of those things and not operating from fear.

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

True friends stab you in the front.

I don’t want to be on the Internet.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

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.

An honest man is always a child.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

Social media has given us this idea that we should all have a posse of friends when in reality, if we have one or two really good friends, we are lucky.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.