If to live is to progress if you are lucky from foolishness to wisdom then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers alas have to be fools in public while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

Who knows for what we live and struggle and die? Wise men write many books in words too hard to understand. But this the purpose of our lives the end of all our struggle is beyond all human wisdom.

The only medicine for suffering crime and all other woes of mankind is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

On the publicity tour of 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding ' I was asked over and over again if as the writer I felt it was a fair depiction of real life to have someone of my er below average looks hook up with hottie John Corbett.

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

War continues to divide people to change them forever and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.

I'm a writer. I don't support any war. That's my principle.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

And I'm a slow writer: five six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

Be polite write diplomatically even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach one that writing is hard work and two that you have to give up a great deal of life your personal life to be a writer.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth it means to discover a truth.

A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

Always speak the truth think before you speak and write it down afterwards.

A writer's job is to tell the truth.

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

When I sit at my table to write I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

Apart from a few simple principles the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.