Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

Strong emotions such as passion and bliss are indications that you’re connected to Spirit, or ‚inspired,‘ if you will. When you’re inspired, you activate dormant forces, and the abundance you seek in any form comes streaming into your life.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

I love making movies, but there’s nothing like performing live.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Music is really driving my whole life.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

The best football is always about expression of emotion. Always.

We love things we love what they are.

If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

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

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

I like entertaining people. I really miss it.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I think Weetabix and full-fat milk is what it is all about.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

Everyone enjoys doing the kind of work for which he is best suited.

You can call me the bad boy chef all you want. I’m not going to freak out about it. I’m not that bad. I’m certainly not a boy, and it’s been a while since I’ve been a chef.

You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

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

I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.

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.

And die of nothing but a rage to live.

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

I loved what I did. I could’ve been secretary of state for ever.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

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

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

When I’m in the studio, I’m looking for creativity I haven’t matched yet, a feeling I haven’t felt. It’s a high.

I’m a writer first and a singer second.

If you want to be successful, it’s just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

If you have passion, there is no need for excuses because your enthusiasm will trump any negative reasoning you might come up with. Enthusiasm makes excuses a nonissue.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

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.

Starting your own business isn’t just a job – it’s a way of life.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

I don’t believe in ‚thinking‘ old. Although I’ve transitioned through many bodies – a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult – my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

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

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

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

A letter does not blush.

My focus is my art, and that’s what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I’ve turned down many things that I just didn’t believe in.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.