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

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

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

I like being a writer.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

I never expected any sort of success with ‚Mockingbird’… I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

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

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

A home without books is a body without soul.

I’m always trying. Between every book, I think, ‚Well now, it’s time to get down to the serious stuff.‘

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

Lena Waithe won an Emmy for writing while starring on the Netflix show ‚Master of None,‘ but it might be more accurate to call her a Master of Everything.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

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

I’ve actually not read any books on time management.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

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

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

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

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

My mother insisted that her children read.

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

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

‚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.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I’m in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

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

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.

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.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

I write all of my own speeches.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.