‚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.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

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

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

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

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

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

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

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

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.

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 man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

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

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

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

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

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.

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

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

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

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

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.

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

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

Naturally, my stories are about women – I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by ‚feminist.‘ In the beginning, I used to say, ‚Well, of course I’m a feminist.‘ But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not.

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

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter’s school fees.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

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.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

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

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

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.

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

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

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.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.