When I write, I try to become different characters.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

My children came out as individuals in their own right. They were not my products. They had their own characters and were very strong-minded. I gave them a lot of freedom when they were still very young. The one thing they got from me is morals. They would never betray anyone. They are really good people.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

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

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

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

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

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

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona from psyche; you just can’t do it.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

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.

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 learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

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?

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you’re a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you’re casually talking to says something that makes you so mad – you can create an entire scenario around that.

Any hand that I’ve shaken, any person that I met when I was Joe Blow, now that I’m this guy Kevin Hart, has come back. That’s why I treat everybody with respect. I’m always a nice pleasant guy to meet because when they come back to you, they remember.

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.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

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.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

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

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

Character is power.

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

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.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

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.