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.