There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

No matter how much you rehearse on that stage, once you add 30,000 screaming people with flashing cameras into the equation, it’s pretty intense.

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

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

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.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

I write screenplays in the middle of the night.

I’m much more comfortable and confident running out on the field in front of 70,000 people instead of standing in front of a camera trying to say some lines. The people who do that as a profession are very talented because it’s certainly not easy.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

Writing bores me so.

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.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

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

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.

A letter does not blush.

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

Some years ago I became president of Columbia University and learned within 24 hours to be ready to speak at the drop of a hat, and I learned something more, the trustees were expected to be ready to speak at the passing of the hat.

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

When I speak at my local church, which I try to do 35 to 40 times a year, I try in every lesson to take the Old Testament text or New Testament text and apply them to what is happening to me or how that applies to the audience that I’m teaching in a modern, fast-changing, technological world. I use headlines, interfaith and that sort of thing.

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 man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

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

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.

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re going to have to take what they get.

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.

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

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

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

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.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

I’ve been thinking of humorous things since I was… I can’t remember when. All the way through elementary school, all the way through junior high, all the way through high school, through college and after college, I was thinking of the same kinds of things that I say in front of an audience now.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

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?

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

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.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

It could be if I fight in front of one person or one million people. It’s still the same emotions.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

I always have to be writing.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.