What I mean by that is that the point of life as I see it is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans but to achieve happiness and preferably an unselfish happiness.
As long as I am given the opportunity to keep performing and keep exploring in whatever medium I'll be happy. As long as I get to spend time with my family I'll be happy. As long as I can write in some form I'll be happy. It is the essential things like that I equate with happiness.
Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
In America the race goes to the loud the solemn the hustler. If you think you're a great writer you must say that you are.
The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart given surnames and Christian names and sent to walk the earth.
It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do.
I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day rather than a sex symbol.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
I think young writers should get other degrees first social sciences arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.
As long as I don't write about the government religion politics and other institutions I am free to print anything.
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers only minor ones.
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
A good day is one where I can not just read a book but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having but it would not be a good song in my eyes until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song it's just complaining.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
People write negatives things cause they feel that's what sells. Good news to them doesn't sell.
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
It is a fact often observed that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion who cannot write well under other circumstances.
Life is God's novel. Let him write it.