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

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

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.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

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.

Most women put off entertaining until the kids are grown.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

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.

If I was to go to sleep before midnight, I would feel weird about myself, like I wasted a day. My most productive hours are between midnight and five.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I always thought money was something just to make me happy. But I’ve learned that I feel better being able to help my folks, ‚cause we never had nothing. So just to see them excited about my career is more of a blessing than me actually having it for myself.

It’s a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they’re almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy; Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.

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.

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

Make measurable progress in reasonable time.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Feels good to try, but playing a father, I’m getting a little older. I see now that I’m taking it more serious and I do want that lifestyle.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. Friday evening was choir practice. I mean, and at all those gatherings, we sang.

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.

I was raised by strong women, and that DNA is in my daughter and wife.

A lot of times, people have something that they’re afraid of. They’ve got a client that’s mad at them. They’ve got a project that’s due. And they let that stress hang over their head. I don’t let that happen.

My father opened a restaurant. It’s so amazing… it’s so freaking delicious, but I’m telling you I gain five pounds every time I go in there.

I’d like to dial it back 5% or 10% and try to have a vacation that’s not just e-mail with a view.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It’s a parallel thing in me.

Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do… but how much love we put in that action.

One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‚I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.‘ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.

I get up at 7:30 and work four hours a day. Nine to twelve in the morning, five to six in the evening. Businessmen would achieve better results if they studied human metabolism. No one works well eight hours a day. No one ought to work more than four hours.

We use work to numb out. We can’t turn off our machines because we’re afraid we’re going to miss something.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn’t let them into the family brokerage business.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one – it’s the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky – in the big cities, too, for that matter.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

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.

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

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

Short cuts make long delays.

It was a privilege to pray with Governor Romney – for his family and our country.

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

When you want to do your homework, fill out your tax return, or see all the choices for a trip you want to take, you need a full-size screen.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

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.

Just got back from a pleasure trip: I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

I think songwriting is the ultimate form of being able to make anything that happens in your life productive.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

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.

Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.