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?

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

I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

As abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice.

Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don’t see why anybody does.

‚I am‘ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‚I do‘ is the longest sentence?

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

I’m the first to admit this whole salary thing is getting out of control. In the final analysis, it’s still about the work.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

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.

In doubtful cases the more liberal interpretation must always be preferred.

The United States has made serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs, which have had unfortunate repercussions long after the decisions were taken.

The very phrase ‚foreign affairs‘ makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

The pace at which people are taking to digital technology defies our stereotypes of age, education, language and income.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

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.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

The concept of Kimye has more cultural significance than what Page Six could write.

If you judge, investigate.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

A word after a word after a word is power.

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

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

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

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

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

I’m not a macroeconomics person.

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

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

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

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

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.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

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.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.