When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

I trust Russia and China and Iran and North Korea like I trust a Jussie Smollett police report.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

All in all, I just don’t trust journalists – and I don’t think it’s a good practice for me to trust journalists.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

I really don’t believe in magic.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God… They’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

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

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

When I see a story, I ask: is this something I’d like to be in? Is this something I’d like to see? And if I’d like to see it, would I like to tell it?

Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life – I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.

In 1995, I was diagnosed with cancer, and I had to practice what I preached. I had always said to ‚believe in God‘ and ‚don’t give up‘ to little kids who had been diagnosed with cancer. I then thought if I can’t call on that same God and same strength that I told people about, I would be a liar and a phony.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

I love to watch videos, and I’ve always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

We have food all around us all the time, and if we haven’t eaten for three hours, we think we’re starving. You’re not starving – human beings can go for 30 days without food.

With action films, it’s great if it’s not just driven by action, but by a good story and interesting characters, as well. Though, there’s nothin‘ like kicking butt!

If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

I don’t know the law, the kind of law of quantity and quality, but I think the opportunity of people being able to express themselves and to have the means of production is a great thing. It’s also changing how we’re telling stories.

I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

In my father’s generation, the product was 80 percent of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20 percent. It now seems that 80 percent of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

People may think I’m trying something new by telling stories, but they’re just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That’s what I do.

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

Many people say that this is not an easy issue, we cannot just say that this is how it is, it’s not black and white. But I say that this is black and white. Either we stop the emissions or we don’t. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

I love that I can tell the truth and have people laugh at it.

People are skeptical of many televangelists, and I’m sensitive to that.

I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things.

I believed in God when cancer come to me. Now when I speak, I speak with authority because I’ve been there.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

The way I define ‚intelligent design‘ is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

I’m not searching for hard news; I’m not a journalist, but I’m interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it’s a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven’t flinched.

Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.

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.

Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.

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.