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

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‚Automobile Magazine.‘ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

The first real thought that I had of something that I might do was to write for car magazines, because I always had a car thing.

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

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I’m not an improv guy. I’m a writer-guy who presents what he’s written.

So many writers don’t like to write… I like to write, and sometimes I’m afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don’t want to leave it. And as a result, I’ll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

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

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

Language is the dress of thought.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

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

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

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

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

I always liked characters that were more grounded in reality.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

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

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I’ve seen on some of the songs that I’ve written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

My enthusiasm seems to cause my world to endlessly offer me cooperative, co-creating experiences. I’m willing and I’m eager, and not just about my writing – I feel the same way about staying in shape, enjoying my family, giving a lecture, or whatever it may be.

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

I don’t set out to write about spirituality; I am free to do something different every time.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

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

You are always hoping that movie audiences are interested in characters and interested in story values rather than just mindless special effects. But you never know.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

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

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

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.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

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

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

I think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 – for albums, anyway.

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

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.