The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

Success is always dangerous, and we need to be alert and avoid becoming the victims of our own success. Will we influence the world for Christ, or will the world influence us?

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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.

My readers – and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.

If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there’s a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.

Our enemy, the devil, wants to control us, and his target is our will. The main way he tries to influence our will is through lying to us.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

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.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

It’s the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change – as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

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

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money. You have to have obedience; otherwise, the idea can spread that you don’t have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

If we go on your iPhone and go to the dictionary and look up ‚humble,‘ 80 per cent of the definition is negative. It’s a controlling word. It’s a way to control the masses and to control the sheep.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I think some people would love to be able to make the clothes I make – and of course, I do influence them, but they keep simplifying, and minimalism doesn’t quite work.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Bhai was my hero and he had immense influence on me.

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

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

Power over a man’s subsistence is power over his will.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

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.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

I don’t do research. I never have.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

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.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

When I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‚There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.‘ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

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

I feel like I’m changing pop culture.