My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool.

Who’s my hero? That’s a great question… Well, I think my dad is my hero, because he’s someone I look up to every day.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.

My dad was very intelligent, had a very strong personality. I was amazed with my father.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

My father was grounded, a very meat-and-potatoes man. He was a baker.

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

The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.

All women do have a different sense of sexuality, or sense of fun, or sense of like what’s sexy or cool or tough.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

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’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

If you appear in the ‚Atlantic‘ or ‚Harper’s‘ or the ‚New Yorker,‘ by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I’m a writer.

I’m not a playwright.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

My son is becoming me – just a silly, silly prankster guy.

I grew up around lots of men – my father, my brothers, my uncles – so I wasn’t intimidated by them.

My father was a research scientist in tropical medicine, so I always assumed I would be a scientist, too. I felt that medicine was too vague and inexact, so I chose physics.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

It’s disgusting, but my father taught me when your mouth gets dry, just suck the sweat out of your own jersey. There’s no bravado to any of it; it’s just a disgusting little trick.

From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I’m doing everything that I can, working with experts, really studying the statistics to figure out a way we can make it cool or normal to be kind and loving.

My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States.

His father is governor of Media, and though he has the greatest command given him of all the rest of my generals, he still covetously desires more, and my being without issue spurs him on to this wicked design. But Philotas takes wrong measures.

To be immortalized in a ride is a very cooI thing.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer… in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

I’m a writer first and a singer second. And then I started editing my own videos when I was 17, so it’s a process I’ve been doing since I was younger.

I’m a singer, a writer and an actress – when I find something that I feel good enough about doing.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Apart from life, a strong constitution, and an abiding connection to the Thembu royal house, the only thing my father bestowed upon me at birth was a name, Rolihlahla.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.

My father worked for a children’s home called Dr. Barnardo’s Homes. They’re a charity.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They’re my biggest heroes. I love everything about Leonard Cohen: his lyrics and his voice. He seems like a really clever man, and Bob Dylan does as well. He’s just really cool.

I think the message has already been sent to Hollywood, which is that this kid’s a hard worker, he’s talented, and people are coming out to see him. And when you have box-office results, Hollywood treats you different. Hollywood stands up.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

People are always coming up to me and saying, ‚I heard your dad’s speech, and it’s really great.‘ And they’ll mention some place I didn’t even know my dad was going to.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.