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.