The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

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

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

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

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Writing bores me so.

The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.

A yawn is a silent shout.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

I’ve always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I’ve heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything; every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.

I’m going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

I describe myself as a simple Buddhist monk. No more, no less.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

How to drive a guy crazy: send him a telegram and on the top put ‚page 2.‘

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

I’m so glad I never feel important, it does complicate life!

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

Y’all are so cute and y’all talk so proper over here. I love England.

I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk because for years I had been giving myself out in words.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings.

The educated Southerner has no use for an ‚r‘, except at the beginning of a word.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

Just talk to me as a father – not what the Constitution says. What do you feel?

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

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.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

The prospect of dating someone in her twenties becomes less appealing as you get older. At some point in your life, your tolerance level goes down and you realize that, with someone much younger, there’s nothing really to talk about.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

The kids never listen to you, especially the youngest ones.

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can’t really measure degrees of difficulty.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

In order to have friends, you must first be one.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child.

I don’t argue when people say that my message is simple, but I believe Jesus‘ message was simple. Jesus didn’t go around condemning people.

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.

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

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

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

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

I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.

Silence is safer than speech.