Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

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.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of ‚like‘ has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel neurotic. So it’s better for the family if I’m working.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

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

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Dissents speak to a future age.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

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.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

‚No comment‘ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

War is what happens when language fails.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

What’s another word for Thesaurus?

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

If you look at ‚Blade Runner,‘ it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday, and there are all kinds of different versions of it.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

There are two bowlers who I think are very tough to play against – Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel.

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It’s become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

I ain’t never called nobody no redskin. I’ve never been mad, like, ‚Get out of this restaurant, you redskin.‘

In 2013, the week before I dropped ‚Crenshaw,‘ ‚Complex‘ wrote an article that said that Nipsey Hussle is one of the top 25 underperforming artists. I was so offended that I responded with my own opinion about these journalists – their point of view is not validated in our culture.

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Never regret what you don’t write.

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

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

I’ve been reading tabloids since I was nine. I love a good story.

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.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

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

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

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

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.‘

And one more thing.

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.