One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

A letter does not blush.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

A home without books is a body without soul.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

A fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

You don’t tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.

There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

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

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

You don’t lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

Charm is a way of getting the answer ‚Yes‘ without asking a clear question.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

I don’t do research. I never have.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

I exaggerate when I’m angry, but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.

Stand a little less between me and the sun.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.