When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

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.

I start each book when it’s ready and never before.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.

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.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself, The more he gives to others, the more he gets himself. The Way of Heaven does one good but never does one harm. The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

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.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are – more humane.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries – for heavy ones they cannot.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

There is a need for financial reform along ethical lines that would produce in its turn an economic reform to benefit everyone. This would nevertheless require a courageous change of attitude on the part of political leaders.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

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.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they’re rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.

I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.

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

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

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

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.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Players now have a groin injury for months and months, and I often think they don’t really give a toss whether they’re playing or not because they’re getting paid anyway.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

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.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.