The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning truth beauty.

Of course all of the software I write runs on Linux that's the beauty of standards and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS and you don't have to run mine and we can use the same applications anyway!

The world is a crazy beautiful ugly complicated place and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away that's when this stuff comes.

I mean the beauty of being a writer is it's not like being a swimmer. When they were talking about our Olympic swimmers and they'd say 'Oh she's so old ' and she's all of 25 or something. So the beauty for a writer is that you can keep doing it right into your dotage and I hope to be able to keep doing it as long as I can get away with it yeah.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract to express it in the most general terms to find some universal formula for it.

As an inspiration to the author I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace power beauty motion mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats I am only surprised that all do not.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Sid Vicious began the age of participation in which everyone could be the artist. Sid proved that you don't have to play well to be the star. You can play badly or not even at all. I endorsed that attitude. If you can't write songs no problem - simply steal one and change it to your taste.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

It has taken me years of struggle hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple beautiful sentence.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.

I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book If art doesn't make us better then what on earth is it for.

It is no great art to say something briefly when like Tacitus one has something to say when one has nothing to say however and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds the book of their words and the book of their art.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene and as if by magic we see a new meaning in it.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.