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

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

I write all of my own speeches.

No parent is perfect; we all can look back and think of things we could’ve done to help our children be better prepared for adulthood. And sometimes it’s best to admit it to them and encourage them to learn from our mistakes.

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low.

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

I think my worst problem is actually living in the moment and understanding everything that’s going on. I feel like I’m in my own bubble.

I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘

Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image.

I’ve always appreciated a turn of phrase.

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.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

What nourishes me also destroys me.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

I really have no interest in myself.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

Instead of blaming everyone and everything else for your problems, pray for God to help you take an inventory of what’s been on your mind so you can think about what you’ve been thinking about.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‚That person I see is a savage monster;‘ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

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.

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.

I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

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.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

Naturally, everybody has certain things they wish they hadn’t done in life. They wish they hadn’t kicked their dog when they were ten or something.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

I always have to be writing.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

It is important for you to know who you are and who you may become. It is more important than what you do, even as vital as your work is and will be.

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don’t regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that’s happening to me, and some days I feel everyone’s waiting for me to mess up.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.