Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

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

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need, if I die by four o’clock.

When I was 10 years old, I loved – I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

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

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Teamwork is so important that it is virtually impossible for you to reach the heights of your capabilities or make the money that you want without becoming very good at it.

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

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

I am the freest author in the world.

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

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.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people; and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

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.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

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.

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another’s money. Idiots!

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

I wanted to write.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

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.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

I don’t read ‚chick lit,‘ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

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.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

I’ve never preached one sermon on money, on just finances. I want to stay away from it.

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.

Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, ‚The Martian Chronicles.‘