Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Sometimes I feel like being an intellectual. Sometimes I like to just be aggressive and all the way in my feelings. Sometimes I might be emotional, or sometimes I might drag on the track and be lazy. I just like to share the different states of existence of Kevin Gates with the rest of the world.

I am amazed at the wonders of technology and am grateful for the ways in which we are able to use it to share the Gospel around the world.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

I like being a writer.

I’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ll always write.

By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

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

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

Men’s ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

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.

For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.

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.

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

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

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.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

What is thine is mine, and all mine is thine.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

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.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

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

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.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

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

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.

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.

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn’t the right one.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

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.

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

The second time around, I’ll understand that, as a husband, my wife doesn’t care about my opinions. I just need to tell her the things that will continue to help me stack the brownie points.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

You can stroke people with words.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance.