The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?

'Tis easy to write epigrams nicely but to write a book is hard

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

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those who move easiest have learned to dance.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer, because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

History should be written as philosophy.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels, and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

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

There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

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 knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

Sometimes reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

Until I became a published writer I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject... they would have spoiled my natural style, made me observe caution, would have hedged me with rules.

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.

My books are like water, those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid stable business.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand, I teach in order to learn.

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute.

The only thing I shy away from is non-consensual violence. I can't write a story where someone is a simple victim because it's boring.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Many books require no thought from those who read them and for a very simple reason, they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

To write well express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do.

I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

Kudos to the educators, athletes, dancers, judges, janitors, politicians, artists, actors, writers, singers, poets and social activist, to all who dare to look at like with humor, determination and respect

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It's a natural process.

Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself.

Who then to frail mortality shall trust, But limns the water or but writes in dust.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book and does.

I think I've really exhausted the magical. It was a lot of fun, but I've put it behind me for the time being.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

Don't ever forget two things I'm going to tell you. One, don't believe everything that's written about you. Two, don't pick up too many checks.

I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter, because some new idea has hit me.

We do not need to proselytise, either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric - and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.

I've been asked this question so many times - 'do you feel you need to write a book for adults?' No, I don't need to write a book for adults.

You must stay drunk on writing, so reality cannot destroy you.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading, or do things worth writing.

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

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

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen particularly.

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Authors have established it as a kind of rule that a man ought to be dull sometimes, as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.

You know the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story you follow a lead and that leads you to something else, and then by the time you finish the story is nothing like you expected.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long, and the age of the great epics is past.

And they write innumerable books, being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation and dodging his emptiness.

Today writers want to impress other writers.

That is sad, until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of lying.

I start drawing and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.

I'm clearly most well known for my music. Eventually ultimately I'll be writing books. I'm still writing articles now. I just consider myself a writer.

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

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement, then it becomes a mistress and then it becomes a master and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public.

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

I think it was very impertinent of him to write to you at all, and very hypocritical. I hate such false friends. Why could not he keep on quarrelling with you as his father did before him?

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

How can you contrive to write so even?

I think I did pretty well considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.

One of Edward's Mistresses was Jane Shore who has had a play written about her, but it is a tragedy and therefore not worth reading.

At some point I would like to write a book and other things but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.

Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up.

As a playwright you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.