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

A book worth reading is worth buying.

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.

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

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 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 wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

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 knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

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

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

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.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

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.

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.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

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.

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.

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

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.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.