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

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

What is politics? Political system is equal to development politics plus political politics.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

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

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say ‚LOL.‘ Just what? But it means ‚laugh.‘ Why don’t you just laugh? What are you doing?

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

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.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

To some degree it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.

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

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

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

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.

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

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

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

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

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

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

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

All religions and all communities have the same rights, and it is my responsibility to ensure their complete and total protection. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

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.

So confident am I in the intentions, as well as wisdom, of the government, that I shall always be satisfied that what is not done, either cannot, or ought not to be done.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

Coffee is a language in itself.

The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it’s a major problem, that’s just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.

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.

Ninety-nine percent of the men and women of the FBI… are just professionals. I don’t want Americans, if an FBI agent knocks on their door, to have to be worried about well, is he a Democrat or a Republican? He’s an FBI agent.

A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it, too. But the government won’t allow it.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

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.

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government.

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