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.

I searched for years I found no love. I’m sure that love will never be a product of plasticity.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

It could be if I fight in front of one person or one million people. It’s still the same emotions.

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

I have good days and bad days.

Smiles are the language of love.

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I’d just go back to Virginia.

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.

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.

I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I’m tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

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

I love to sing and I really love to write, but in terms of being onstage, I’m not that comfortable, which I think is sort of clear.

A letter does not blush.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I’ve often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

Even when a person has all of life’s comforts – good food, good shelter, a companion – he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.

When I was fourteen and first started going out, I always wanted to be the opposite of everyone else. So I would go to the club in a polo T-shirt and pants and sneakers and a hat on backward, just so I would not be dressed like other girls.

All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

I write all my sermons.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

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 think that it’s okay to be mad at someone who hurt you. This isn’t about, like, the pageantry of trying to seem like nothing affects you.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Seeing Pax get extra-nervous about which shirt he is going to wear when he meets Aung San Suu Kyi, I get very moved. He rightfully doesn’t get nervous going to a movie premiere; he gets nervous going to meet her.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice.

People like to hear the word ‚love.‘

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

In fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.

If you can talk, you can write.

Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

I’m not a very creative person, you know? I’m not really an art person. I’m not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.