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.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn’t want to have some contrived composition.

There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

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.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

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.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

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

Prayer is simply a two-way conversation between you and God.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

Let me tell you what I literally told every world leader I’ve met with, and I’ve met them all: It’s never, never, never been a good bet to bet against America. We have the finest fighting force in the world.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

A political event was that I met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary. He is a young, intelligent guy, very sure of himself and extraordinarily audacious; I think we hit it off well.

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.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

So, I’m lying on the couch and Laura walks in and I say, ‚Free at last,‘ and she says ‚You’re free all right, you’re free to do the dishes.‘ So I say, ‚You’re talking to the former president, baby,‘ and she said, ‚consider this your new domestic policy agenda.‘

Meeting President Obama was amazing. Very inspiring.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I’m not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings.

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‚Where’s the self-help section?‘ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

‚Royal Beatings‘ was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to ‚The New Yorker‘ in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. ‚The New Yorker‘ sent me nice notes, though – penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

I miss people. I miss going anywhere and meeting a random person and saying ‚Hi‘ and having a conversation about life. I love people.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

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

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

He who talks more is sooner exhausted.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

If I go to Italy, I will certainly request to meet with Pope Francis, whom I admire very much.

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.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

The greatest thrill in my life was to represent the United States of America.

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.