You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

Gold is good in its place; but loving, brave, patriotic men are better than gold.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

I wanted to write.

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.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

Thomas Jefferson once said, ‚We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.‘ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

Water is the driving force of all nature.

Bravery never goes out of fashion.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

You want to do good things, and once you’ve done a couple of good things in a row, you think ‚Well gee, let’s not mess this up.‘ But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.

Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs.

I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

I love sleep; it’s my favorite.

I think that you can love people without it being the great love.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Sometimes, I think if you get away from what you’re called to do, it’s more of a distraction.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

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

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

I think women want freedom. They want to be empowered. They want hope. They want love; they want all the things that I want, and I’m not afraid to say those things and act on them, and I think that’s why they identify with me.

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.

My imagination is a twisted place.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

The truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation, so make your words count.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone… Bad food is fake food… food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

Love always ends differently and it always begins differently – especially with me.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

The best thing about being a dad? Well, I think it’s just the thing that every man wants – to have a son and heir.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

Because of a great love, one is courageous.

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

I really want to love somebody. I do. I just don’t know if it’s possible forever and ever.