When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

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

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.

I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

History is more or less bunk.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

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

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It’s the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

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

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

I get impatient with people working on a film that have their head in their hands like it’s the most complicated thing in the world.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

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.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

Lena Waithe won an Emmy for writing while starring on the Netflix show ‚Master of None,‘ but it might be more accurate to call her a Master of Everything.

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.

If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

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

Do everything as in the eye of another.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

Liberals are not always so liberal with people who disapprove – disapprove of their point of view.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

Perception often lags behind reality, and I can say from experience that the vast majority of public officials in Louisiana are much better than our reputation holds us to be.

Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.