It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.

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.

Babies don’t need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach… it pisses me off! I’ll go over to a little baby and say ‚What are you doing here? You haven’t worked a day in your life!‘

I mean, I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life.

As a coach, one thing that used to frustrate me was one player would make a bad decision, and that’s all you would read about in the papers all over the country. We have so many athletes do so many wonderful things for other people, and you never read about it.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

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.

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.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

Politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion.

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

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

My principles are more important than the money or my title.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.

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.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

Because the Internet is so new, we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the Web.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

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.

The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called ‚The Truth‘.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

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

Basketball is my passion, I love it. But my family and friends mean everything to me. That’s what’s important. I need my phone so I can keep in contact with them at all times.

Winning is the most important. Everything is consequence of that.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

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

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

2018 is an incredibly important election year, not just with the important midterms here in the U.S., but you just had the Mexican elections. You have Brazil. You have India coming up at the beginning of next year. There’s an assortment of elections around the EU. We’re very serious about this. We know that we need to get this right.

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

When you create circumstances together, when you try everything, then you can lose. But you need to show the importance.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

Fashion is very important. It is life-enhancing and, like everything that gives pleasure, it is worth doing well.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

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

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.