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.

No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

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.

By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.

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

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

You don’t tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called ‚The Truth‘.

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.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

It’s a very good question, very direct, and I’m not going to answer it.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.

If you can talk, you can write.

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

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

Being politically correct means saying what’s polite rather than what’s accurate. I like to be accurate.

My own experience is use the tools that are out there. Use the digital world. But never lose sight of the need to reach out and talk to other people who don’t share your view. Listen to them and see if you can find a way to compromise.

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

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

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

I had a great time being a salesman because of the pitches that I gave when I was selling shoes. However, I don’t think I’m as well versed in shoes as I am in comedy. Being a salesman was all about being a people person, and I enjoy being around people. I also love talking to people – which is why I think I did so well.

One must steer, not talk.

Diplomacy is listening to what the other guy needs. Preserving your own position, but listening to the other guy. You have to develop relationships with other people so when the tough times come, you can work together.

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

I don’t like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

No one knows who is listening, say nothing you would not wish put in the newspapers.

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

I meant what I said and I said what I meant.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

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

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

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.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.