There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

I have always reckoned the dignity of the republic of first importance and preferable to life.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

I like to be creative.

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.

It’s in my blood to be around people while I was training.

I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, and for a good half of my career I didn’t like it. I always wanted to do other things.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops‘ hearts, not just their heads.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

It’s very fun to be the hunter of the sounds. The hunter of the right energy. And it’s not really about if every sound is correct; it’s more the energy – if it hits you in some way, it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s not perfect. I’m still very excited while hunting for songs.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

Death is a fearful thing.

The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

A solution built by an artist serves the artist more than the solution the capitalist comes up with.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

While there’s life, there’s hope.

People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

The solar system can support a trillion humans. And then we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

Lettin‘ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier ‚n puttin‘ it back in.

I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.