The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

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.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

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.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

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

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

They’ve got this crazy actor who’s 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.

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

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don’t know what that is; I don’t think too much about that.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

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!

I’m not an expert on the arms race.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

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

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.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

You do get certain publications in the States where, if things don’t go according to plan, they flip the story and it becomes very negative.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

If music be the food of love, play on.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

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.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.