There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I write all my sermons.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

I have always enjoyed watching my songs make people cry.

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

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.

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

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

Green Eggs and Ham was the story of my life. I wouldn’t eat a thing when I was a kid, but Dr. Seuss inspired me to try cauliflower!

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

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

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

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

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

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

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

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

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 write all of my own speeches.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

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.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

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.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

You fail only if you stop writing.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

I love stories about women.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

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.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

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

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.