The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

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

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.

I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, and for a good half of my career I didn’t like it. I always wanted to do other things.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

I write all my sermons.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

A letter does not blush.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

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.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

There’s something about being in front of a live audience that’s fun. It’s a really interesting, very electric, very alive, and intense experience, and you can’t get it anywhere else. And I’ve been doing it since I was 23, so it’s part of my being – it’s part of my fabric as a person.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

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

Racing, competing, it’s in my blood. It’s part of me, it’s part of my life; I have been doing it all my life and it stands out above everything else.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow 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.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity. This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.

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

I guess you could say it’s always been my destiny to be a performer.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

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.

As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

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

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

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

I love food.

To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.

If your man is a sports enthusiast, you may have to resign yourself to his spouting off in a monotone on a prize fight, football game or pennant race.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Fighting football, not serenity football – that is what I like.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I was saving the name of ‚Geisel‘ for the Great American Novel.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.