When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

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.

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

Never regret what you don’t write.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

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.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

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

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on 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.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

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.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

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 ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

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

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

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.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

Every story has its demands.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

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.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel neurotic. So it’s better for the family if I’m working.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.