You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

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.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

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

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

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.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

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.

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’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

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.‘

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

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.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

I write all of my own speeches.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I wrote an article on a new Porsche for ‚Automobile Magazine.‘ I knew the editor, and she asked me to write this article. So I’m more proud of that than anything.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

‚The Lady’s World‘ should be made the recognized organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

All of my writing is God-given.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

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

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

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

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‘.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.