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.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

I’m always amazed by the people who work on stage who sing night after night, day after day, week in week out.

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.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

The end of labor is to gain leisure.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.

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

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

I don’t know about other people, but I love to work.

I only live in my music, and I have scarcely begun one thing when I start on another. As I am now working, I am often engaged on three or four things at the same time.

I think I became more productive through not having children. I never really had the desire to have them. My husband didn’t want them either, so it worked out well.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

At some point in time, you definitely have to go drama. Not to say that you’re going drama just because everybody else does it. You do it to challenge yourself. You do it because, naturally, in the profession of acting, you want to show growth. You want to say that you take the craft seriously.

People say ‚I want to be rich‘. The question is, ‚Are you willing to do what it takes?‘

As a producer, as a CEO of Hartbeat Productions, I am making deals to put my company in place to win, to put my staff to work so that while all this stuff is going on, they’re in the kitchen cooking. So it’s understanding the longevity of the entertainment business; you get out of it what you put into it.

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.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

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

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Time is the least thing we have of.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

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

I never drink coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon.

I don’t think the money people in Hollywood have ever thought I was normal, but I am dedicated to my work and that’s what counts.

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

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

I don’t go to bed at 1 A.M. and wake up at 5 A.M. and say, ‚Let’s see if I can get this done today.‘

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.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Over the course of my career in law enforcement, I have witnessed over and over again the selflessness and sacrifice of law enforcement who lay their lives on the line every day to protect people who they will never meet and people who will never know their names.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

A lot of critics object to what I do, but I got into comedy to make people laugh, and I’ve always worked hard.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

When I’m making music, I can hear all the parts, all the instruments. I can hear what it should be.

Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it’ll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.