I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

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.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

I’m not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful; it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think – or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

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.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

A person standing in front of an audience without enthusiasm for his subject and his actions is disconnected from his spirit.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

I said I was ‚The Greatest,‘ I never said I was the smartest!

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do. What I do is music. I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

I write all my sermons.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

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

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.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

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

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

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.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

Freedom lies in being bold.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it. Even if you’re wrinkled.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

A person who is truly authentic doesn’t need to play a role in life, we think, but can simply be him – or herself.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.