Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

Everything rises and falls on leadership.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

You’re not going to say anything about me that I’m not going to say about myself. There’s so many things that I think about myself; if someone really wanted to get at me, they could say this and this and this. So I’m going to say it before they can. It’s the best policy for me.

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

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.

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.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn’t really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn’t have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

I don’t feel very comfortable defending my fashion except to say that people don’t have to buy it. You do have to consume. You have to live. If you’ve got the money to be able to afford it, then it’s really good to buy something from me, but don’t buy too much.

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.

I write all of my own speeches.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

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?

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.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

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

I am who I am. That’s why my friends and peers respect and appreciate me. I don’t change or cater my actions to fit my surroundings. I’m myself 24/7. People appreciate that.

If you are a parent, you have probably already realized that your children are always watching what you do. And just as children watch their parents and emulate their behavior, so do employees who are watching their bosses.

I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.

I’ve been so blessed to play for the greatest coach at a time when our organization has done incredible things. I’ve played with the best teammates. Playing for Mr. Kraft and what his influence on the team has been.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.

He who molds the public sentiment… makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to make.

I’m evangelical on the subject of some chefs and writers.

I think people should feel encouraged to be themselves.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

I don’t even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

Language is the dress of thought.

I always have to be writing.

If you can talk, you can write.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

A cloudy day or a little sunshine have as great an influence on many constitutions as the most recent blessings or misfortunes.

I felt like, for so many years – and I still even feel it – as a girl, you can’t really expect to go on stage and dress like a boy and jump around and scream with the audience and mosh and stuff, and every time that happens, I feel really proud.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.

I’d like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

Evangelism is when the Gospel, which is good news, is preached or presented to all people.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.