This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

I guess I’m just inspired to tell stories.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

This above all; to thine own self be true.

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

I just feel that ‚The Color Purple,‘ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn’t exist without the performance-art element.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.

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

For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

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.

Naturally, my stories are about women – I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by ‚feminist.‘ In the beginning, I used to say, ‚Well, of course I’m a feminist.‘ But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

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.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.

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

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

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I always have to be writing.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

I’m just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I’m inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.