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.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Good leaders must communicate vision clearly, creatively, and continually. However, the vision doesn’t come alive until the leader models it.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

It’s tough to negotiate from a position of weakness.

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

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‚Did you sleep good?‘ I said ‚No, I made a few mistakes.‘

A woman will doubt everything you say except it be compliments to herself.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

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

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

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.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

Facebook is really about communicating and telling stories… We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping solve the crisis that’s out there.

I like it when someone tells me ‚I don’t agree.‘ This is a true collaborator. When they say ‚Oh, how great, how great, how great,‘ that’s not useful.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

You don’t lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

A home without books is a body without soul.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

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.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

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

That is never too often repeated, which is never sufficiently learned.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

I can honestly say, after talking about my mom passing away, I got the biggest weight off of my chest. Comedy is my therapy. That’s how I deal with my problems, my personal battles. I talk about it. I give it to my fans. When they laugh at it, it’s a release, for lack of a better word.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

There is no greater index of character so sure as the voice.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

I was also a junior and I know how you learn from seniors, that’s how you follow. Speeches don’t work.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

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

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

There is no wealth but life.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

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.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

People like to hear the word ‚love.‘

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

A lie cannot live.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.