When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.

If tomorrow I want to release a rock album or I want to release a bachata album, nobody can tell me anything – why can’t I?

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

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.

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

Like Frank Sinatra, I’m doing it my way.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

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.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

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.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn’t, then why would you say I am.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Everything is an open book. I don’t speak on other people’s hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I’m going to talk about it. That’s what my fan base appreciates the most. I’m universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

For my career, I wouldn’t go racing if I didn’t enjoy it. I still need to have my say, and not just get put with a team and get told to deal with it.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

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

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

A word after a word after a word is power.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

I’ve had everything pierced at some point.

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

I don’t do research. I never have.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

I just want to be myself.

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

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

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.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that – that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

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.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

I like to be in control of how I look and how I feel and how I act.

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

I think women want to take care of themselves, and I think having a voice in how that is done is very important.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.