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.

I don’t write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

‚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.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‚That person I see is a savage monster;‘ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

I wish I knew why I am so anguished.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Naturally, my stories are about women – I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by ‚feminist.‘ In the beginning, I used to say, ‚Well, of course I’m a feminist.‘ But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not.

I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.

But I think we’re also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They’ve seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There’s so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

I don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

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

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.

Love is an interesting thing. Perhaps I’ve never been in love before – I don’t really know? I think I have. I guess it’s subjective in that way.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

My own experience is use the tools that are out there. Use the digital world. But never lose sight of the need to reach out and talk to other people who don’t share your view. Listen to them and see if you can find a way to compromise.

Listen with your eyes for feelings.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

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.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

I have definitely been curious and involved in the process; even as a young actor. I was always looking at where the camera was, what story it was telling. And as my experience grew, I wanted to know even more.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

My ‚fear‘ is my substance, and probably the best part of me.