Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

So many writers don’t like to write… I like to write, and sometimes I’m afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don’t want to leave it. And as a result, I’ll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.

The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

My goal is to be number one in MMA.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don’t go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won’t laugh at you.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions – Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.

That feeling is so intoxicating, walking off the court holding the Larry O’Brien trophy. So I just want to do that again.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

With audacity one can undertake anything, but not do everything.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.

Do not reveal what you have thought upon doing, but by wise council keep it secret being determined to carry it into execution.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Everybody that’s successful lays a blueprint out.

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

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

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

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

And one more thing.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

History should be written as philosophy.

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.

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.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

Small aim is a crime.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter’s school fees.

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

I want to be financially secure by the time I have kids.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

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

It’s not easy to define poetry.

If I’d had some set idea of a finish line, don’t you think I would have crossed it years ago?

It’s been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

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.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

To be successful, you need results in a row. You can’t win, lose, win, lose.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.