No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

I’m afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn’t fit that will become unnecessary.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

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.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

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.

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.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited ‚first chapters‘. I have indeed written many.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.

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.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

‚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.

We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.

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

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

It seems like when I was growing up there was more compromise, wanting to work with each other, and I think all of them – all of the lawmakers – have hearts to do what’s right, and they all are passionate about it.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

All of my writing is God-given.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

I read poetry to save time.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

It’s a funny old world.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

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

The fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this Agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

Syllables govern the world.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Look, freedom is an overwhelming American notion. The idea that we want to see the world, the peoples of the world free is something that all of us subscribe to.

I’m not a nerd, don’t plan to be a nerd and read books – which I can’t do at all.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

We’ve been programmed, from the time that we were very, very little, about what we can’t do – about what is impossible.

I can’t play soccer, and I’m not a great swimmer. I won’t drown, but you won’t see me doing laps in a pool.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.