When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

Since thou are not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour.

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

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.

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

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 moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance – the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

I’ve always tended to write songs prolifically.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.

Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at a breakneck pace. Take leave when you’ve earned it, spend time with your families.

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

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

It’s life isn’t it? You plow ahead and make a hit. And you plow on and someone passes you. Then someone passes them. Time levels.

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 would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

Just on a practical side, if you wake up early in the morning – like at 4:30 in the morning – you’re going to have some free time to yourself to make things happen, to take care of things that are important to you.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like, ‚Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do‘.

I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don’t allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

A letter does not blush.

A lot of people are focused on taking over the world or doing the biggest thing and getting the most users. I think part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

What one has, one ought to use: and whatever he does he should do with all his might.

Well, I’m working all the time to stay out of trouble!

Whatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

Action expresses priorities.

My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did my own.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

I don’t have anything to say about other people’s art and their work.