Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

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

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Money ain’t everything.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

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.

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

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

I purposely don’t talk about money, because people are already skeptical about TV preachers. But I do say that I want you to be blessed. To me, prosperity is having health, having great children, having peace, good relationships. It’s not about the money.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

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

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

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?

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

America isn’t Congress. America isn’t Washington. America is the striving immigrant who starts a business, or the mom who works two low-wage jobs to give her kid a better life. America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

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.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

To rule a country of a thousand chariots, there must be reverent attention to business, and sincerity; economy in expenditure, and love for men; and the employment of the people at the proper seasons.

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.

Everything is my demon muse. I have a muse which whispers in my ear and says, ‚Do this, do that,‘ but it’s my demon who provokes me.

You make a movie, and if somebody reads something into it, then great, more power to him.

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter’s school fees.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I do believe in the energy and the productivity of the American business world.

Successful people make money. It’s not that people who make money become successful, but that successful people attract money. They bring success to what they do.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.

Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

I’m a painter in sound.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

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.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.