Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

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

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

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.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel neurotic. So it’s better for the family if I’m working.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

I am not a consecutive writer.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

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.

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

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

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people; and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.

The wisest hustler can suddenly fall for the worst tramp and lose all of his money on her. The hustler is aware of his own weaknesses and openings to con. This awareness is his edge.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

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

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

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 will never win an Oscar, and do you know why? First of all, because I’m not Jewish. Secondly, I make too much money for all those old farts in the Academy.

Don’t matter how much money you got, there’s only two kinds of people: there’s saved people and there’s lost people.

Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread.

Being willing to donate the taxpayers‘ money is not the same as being willing to put your own money where your mouth is.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

Of course, to have money is just great because you can do what you think is important to you.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Money does not change people, people change.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

I love money because I’ve earned it. I won sixty G’s with my first knockout – and the week before, I was collecting social welfare.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

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.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

Well, I thought the deal was, when you went to work for the government you weren’t supposed to make money!

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.

I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.