There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

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.

When I was 8, I thought I was Harrison Ford, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Elvis, and Chuck Norris all at once.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

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 reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

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

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

For a creative writer possession of the ‚truth‘ is less important than emotional sincerity.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

When asked, ‚How do you write?‘ I invariably answer, ‚one word at a time.‘

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

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.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

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.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

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

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

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 love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that’s been made from one of my books, I know that it isn’t going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I’ll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

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.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone’s imagination.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

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

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.