I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.

I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

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.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

A noble person attracts noble people, and knows how to hold on to them.

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

Any hand that I’ve shaken, any person that I met when I was Joe Blow, now that I’m this guy Kevin Hart, has come back. That’s why I treat everybody with respect. I’m always a nice pleasant guy to meet because when they come back to you, they remember.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

I write the paragraph, then I’m crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it’s almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

I’m not searching for hard news; I’m not a journalist, but I’m interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it’s a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven’t flinched.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

These are all personal crises, I’m sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It’s as simple as that.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don’t really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be, and I really like that, too, so it depends. I’ve always had more than one thing going.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

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

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

I intend to inspire people with my story: motivate young people that grew up like myself, or even not like myself. Just, you know, go through the human experience.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

An employer of mine back in the ’80s was kind enough to take me on after a rough patch, and it made a big difference in my life that I knew I was the sort of person who showed up on time. It’s a basic tell of character.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.