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.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.

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.

It sometimes feels like a strange movie, you know, it’s all so weird that sometimes I wonder if it is really happening.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called ‚The Truth‘.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

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

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

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.

We live in an imperfect world, and imperfect people surround us every day.

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

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

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

History should be written as philosophy.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times. It’s best not to ask questions and just enjoy.

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

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.