Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can’t really measure degrees of difficulty.

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.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

I wanted to write.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

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.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

A word after a word after a word is power.

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

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

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

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

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

We should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

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

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

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

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

The situation in the sciences is this: A concept or an idea which cannot be measured or cannot be referred directly to experiment may or may not be useful. It need not exist in a theory.

Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

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

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

All of my writing is God-given.

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

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.

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‘.

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

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.

You can stroke people with words.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

I always believe that there should come a time when your energy, speed, stamina should combine well with your brains.

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

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

I never write about the road. I never write about hotels or anything like that.

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

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.