Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

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.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking – or lack of thinking.

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

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

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.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

I’m an inventor.

I’m still in love with what I do, with the idea of making things up, so hours when I write always feel like very blessed hours to me.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I get a more passionate delivery when I just go in the booth and let the music talk.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to people thinking for themselves.

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.

There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

Disneyland is a work of love. We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.