If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

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.

The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day. The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win – you pass the test.

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.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

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

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

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

It is extremely difficult to say how long the process actually took to finally achieve my fragrance, Boudoir, because there was a lot of time waiting around for other people.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

The one thing I regret was that my work required an enormous amount of my time, and a lot of travel.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

I’m not a nerd, don’t plan to be a nerd and read books – which I can’t do at all.

If you calculate 15 minutes a day to shave, that is 5,000 minutes a year spent shaving.

An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

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.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

I have a little bit of that gamer spirit in me. I just don’t have the time to be a gamer. But in another life, I would be one.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

Work as if you were to live a hundred years. Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

We must use time creatively.

One of the things I realized is that if you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list, your kids fall lower and lower on your list.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Successful people are simply those with successful habits.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

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

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I never drink coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon.

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.

I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

When you play, play hard; when you work, don’t play 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.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

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

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.