It’s not easy to define poetry.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

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

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.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Endless torments dwell about thee: Yet who would live, and live without thee!

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

I believe that economics is based on scarcity of markets. And it’s possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

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.

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

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

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

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Art is the proper task of life.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

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

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don’t think so… I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

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.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‚Thirty days hath September‘ because it actually tells you something.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

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.‘