In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

Every seven years, I sit down and make a whole new plan.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

The best part about being in your thirties is you know what works for you.

Spending time with God through prayer and His Word is a prerequisite for having a great life and fulfilling your purpose.

Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

People always say that you can’t please everybody. I think that’s a cop-out. Why not attempt it? ‚Cause think of all the people you will please if you try.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, ‚No. No, I’m finished. Bye.‘ And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, ‚I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,‘ and I actually meant it.

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.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

Be not a slave of words.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.

A game is like a mirror that allows you to look at yourself.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

I usually don’t like to ‚spoon feed‘ my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.

I’ve never been a jealous person, and I’ve never felt built up by someone else’s failure – that’s a cheap thrill.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.