After I left the White House I kept a foothold in the business of American politics as a talk-show host analyst commentator speechmaker and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner but I was still a partisan a Democrat a blue-stater through and through.

I am a sensitive writer actor and director. Talking business disgusts me. If you want to talk business call my disgusting personal manager.

There's a side to this industry that nurtures divas who can't write. It's a big business.

I think I've got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn't read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anything and everything that he had to work with.

Advertising is a business of words but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They cannot write advertisements and they cannot write plans. They are helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Modern poets talk against business poor things but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

When I was in elementary school I used to write letters to myself. I'd write letters and go 'Dear Kristen-at-16-years-old happy birthday. I hope you're doing something.'

The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought if really want to write it's time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day and I figured I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down wrote this song and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people.

The man who has done his level best... is a success even though the world may write him down a failure.

The best writing is not about the writer the best writing is absolutely not about the writer it's about us it's about the reader.

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.

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

Townes van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.

I know I'm not the best. I'm not the best singer I'm not the best songwriter I'm not the best player.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

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.

Civilization had too many rules for me so I did my best to rewrite them.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.