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

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

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

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.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.

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

I write all my sermons.

When I was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

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

When I was making ‚Star Wars,‘ I wasn’t restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, ‚I’m going to create a world that’s fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it.‘

I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

I have suffered most of the things I write about – or my friends have.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.

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

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

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

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

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.

I played with two lines of action figures when I was a kid: G.I. Joe and Star Wars.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.

At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn’t allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn’t do anything with my classmates.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

I have never sat down and studied the Bible, never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible that I use in my work is remembered from childhood and is the common property of all who were brought up in English-speaking communities.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

A word after a word after a word is power.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

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.

Not many people know this about me, but I’m a natural blonde. My hair went from light blonde naturally to a darker kind of blonde. My mother dyed my hair dark when I was a child, as I loved the look then. So I’m basically a natural blonde.

‚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.‘

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.

I absolutely believed when I was young because the Tooth Fairy was always good to me. The Tooth Fairy generally left me a dollar or two dollars and, as a kid, that was a lot of money.

The Apollo program certainly had no real commercial value. It was done for very different reasons and, I think, very good reasons for the time. It’s an extraordinary achievement of mankind, but it wasn’t sustainable.

I think a lot of the American people feel more than a little disappointed that the high-water mark for human exploration was 1969. The dream of human space travel has almost died for a lot of people.

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.