Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

Don’t be too harsh to these poems until they’re typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

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

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

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

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.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

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

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

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.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

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

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

A letter does not blush.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

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

To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading.

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

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

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

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

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!