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.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I never played with anything like toys.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

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.

It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.

Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

From a young age, I learned to focus on the things I was good at and delegate to others what I was not good at. That’s how Virgin is run. Fantastic people throughout the Virgin Group run our businesses, allowing me to think creatively and strategically.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

I never drink coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

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.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That’s one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

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 most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

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.

If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

At age nine, I got a paper route. Sixty-six papers had to be delivered to sixty-six families every day. I also had to collect thirty cents a week from each customer. I owed the paper twenty cents per customer per week, and got to keep the rest. When I didn’t collect, the balance came out of my profit. My average income was six dollars a week.

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.

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.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I’m honored that everybody’s inspired off my inspiration.

It’s an offseason. These days are valuable for everybody.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

Lost time is never found again.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.