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

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I’ve been called a great adventurer.

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.

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.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.

I wanted to write.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

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?

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

To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, ‚You’re better than the Cassius of old.‘

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

I have always been an old-line Henry Clay Whig.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‚among the most unspeakable crimes in history.‘ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

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

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

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.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

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

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

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

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

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.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel neurotic. So it’s better for the family if I’m working.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

No intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.

As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

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

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.