Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

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.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

I think the reason I don’t read is because, when I’m reading, I feel like I’m missing out on something else. You know, What are my friends doing? Where’s my girlfriend?

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‚Automobile Magazine.‘ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.

A word after a word after a word is power.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

Writing bores me so.

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.

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

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Honestly, I think we should be delighted people still want to read, be it on a Kindle or a Nook or whatever the latest device is.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

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

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

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

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

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

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

The divisions of Perspective are 3, as used in drawing; of these, the first includes the diminution in size of opaque objects; the second treats of the diminution and loss of outline in such opaque objects; the third, of the diminution and loss of colour at long distances.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

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

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

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

I always want to create and do things, or draw.

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.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

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.