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

In twenty years I’ve never had a day when I didn’t have to think about someone else’s needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

I have so much that I want to do. I hate wasting time.

It needs time. Nobody wants to hear it, but that’s the truth: if you want to have success in the future, you have to be ready to work now.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

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.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

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

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, ‚No. No, I’m finished. Bye.‘ And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

I had a period in my life where I decided that I would never be bored again and that, if I had any free time at all, I would make plans, and I would always be doing things. It actually was great for a year or so, but then I lost all of my friends.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

We all knew this. We all knew that it would take more time than any of us want to dig ourselves out of this hole created by this economic crisis.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

I’ve always liked being busy. If I have nothing to do for a week, it just makes me mad.

I’m a day-to-day-type person.

Since thou are not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour.

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

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.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

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 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.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.

Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear, and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

I can write a song in about an hour if it’s a simple country song.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

I don’t care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don’t have an intuitive feeling for equations.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

None of my kids want to be actors. They are actually very interested in being musicians. I think they like the process of film from the outside. Mad is interested in editing. Pax loves music and deejaying.

‚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.‘

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

I have wasted my hours.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

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

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

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.