Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

The proper study of mankind is books.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should 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.

Truth, according to the Christian faith, is God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. Therefore, truth is a relationship.

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

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

The thing about the truth is, not a lot of people can handle it.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.

True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

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

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

I read a lot. I enjoy reading a lot.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

I don’t do research. I never have.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

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

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

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal they have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

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.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

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.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

A gaffe in Washington is someone telling the truth, and telling the truth has never hurt me.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.