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

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.

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

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

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

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

History should be written as philosophy.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

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.

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.

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

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

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

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we’re ever likely to do that is by going into space.

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.

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

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

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.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I wanted to write.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

If you can talk, you can write.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

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.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

Celerity is never more admired than by the negligent.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

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.

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.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

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

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

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

I think that a president needs to have a variety of views presented. But also, there has to be a team effort, because otherwise, I think it creates a dissonance and difficulty.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

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

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.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.