There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

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 is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Waste brings woe, and sorrow hates despair.

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.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

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

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.

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

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.

Everything is perfect in the universe – even your desire to improve it.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

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 spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection. Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood.

All of my writing is God-given.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

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.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

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

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I never had a speech from my father ‚this is what you must do or shouldn’t do‘ but I just learned to be led by example. My father wasn’t perfect.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

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.

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.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

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.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

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.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.

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

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

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘