Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror – not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

As far as I’m concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Let me define a leader. He must have vision and passion and not be afraid of any problem. Instead, he should know how to defeat it. Most importantly, he must work with integrity.

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 still love football, though, and I think cooking is like football. It’s not a job, it’s a passion. When you become good at it, it’s a dream job and financially you need never to worry. Ever.

To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

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

This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

A lot of people like to do certain things, but they’re not that good at it. Keep going through the things that you like to do, until you find something that you actually seem to be extremely good at. It can be anything.

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

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

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they’ll start to fall down and get depressed.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

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.

In everything, satiety closely follows the greatest pleasures.

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

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.

Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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

I love food.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

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

The people you choose to have around you make all the difference. My family and close friends keep me grounded. You have to have a mind of your own and a strong head on your shoulders. Cricket is the most important thing to me, so the rest of it pales in comparison.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like.

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

Many people have an intense feeling about what they’re best at. Too often, they’re driven away from it by other people.

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

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.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.