It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ‚mature‘ critics often are.

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

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

Comedy’s about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you’re saying.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

Pfft, I hate Christmas Day. It’s for children and families. Not for people like me.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

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.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Although I’m only fourteen, I know quite well what I want. I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child. I feel quite independent of anyone.

Children make your life important.

If you want to become fully mature in the Lord, you must learn to love truth. Otherwise, you will always leave open a door of deception for the enemy to take what is meant to be yours.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it’s not just my way or the highway.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, ‚Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?‘ And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.

Some guys look better as they get older.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Maturity is the ability to reap without apology and not complain when things don’t go well.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Parents and teachers, learn to listen, then listen to learn from children.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.

Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource – the minds of our children.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns: children, women, old folks, sick folks.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.

To the women and children, T stands for tender. To the bad guys and thugs, it stands for tough.

I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.

I am not a consecutive writer.

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

God looks after children, animals and idiots.

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.