Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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.

Labor gives birth to ideas.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

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.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

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.

I grew up in a funny way.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

You know, Nirvana used to start rehearsals with the three of us just jamming. For, like, a half an hour, just noise and freeform crap – and usually it was crap. But sometimes things would come from it, and some songs on Nevermind came from that, and ‚Heart Shaped Box‘ and stuff on ‚In Utero‘ just happened that way.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

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.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

I was saving the name of ‚Geisel‘ for the Great American Novel.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they’d be, what position they’d play and so on.

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.

Think off-center.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

Green Eggs and Ham was the story of my life. I wouldn’t eat a thing when I was a kid, but Dr. Seuss inspired me to try cauliflower!

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

It’s always a struggle growing up in Akron.

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

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.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It’s an individual-feel thing, you know?

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

I grew up listening to the Police, I grew up performing in bars, singing Police songs.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

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.

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

I want to be an artist, not… a celluloid aphrodisiac.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

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