Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

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.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

‚Good English‘ is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn’t matter. You said, ‚That’s an American‘ because there’s a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

Words are more powerful than some noises. Noises won’t last long. Lyrics are so important, and people don’t realise that.

When he speaks to you he speaks with an earnest vibe and an earnest energy.

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

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

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.

Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

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

Of course you can’t ‚trust‘ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‚trust‘ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

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

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

I don’t have faith in young people any more. I don’t waste time trying to communicate with them.

People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I’ll give you an example; I don’t read what’s handed to me. People say, ‚Here, here’s your speech, or here’s an idea for a speech.‘ They’re changed. Trust me.

The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of. Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

The way I talk is bizarre.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn’t happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.

I realized why directors are such horrible people – in a way – because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you, and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ‚mature‘ critics often are.

It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

It’s not difficult for me to put my feelings into written form. I try to be concise and to go direct to the subject. This is what people like about my work, and what the critics hate.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

The mark of a true politician is that he is never at a loss for words because he is always half-expecting to be asked to make a speech.

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.

To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

I’ll never make it, it will never happen, because they’re never going to hear me ‚cause they’re screaming all the time.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

I looked the people of Louisiana in the eye and told them exactly what I thought in terms that normal people use.

If you can’t answer a man’s arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

A yawn is a silent shout.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.