"I’m not very good at praying, but what I experience when I’m writing a poem is close to prayer."

"I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say."

"Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. When you’re in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practice. And always think of other people."

“My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”

"Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald."

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."

"Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on."

"You can’t use fiery language to describe a fire. You have to use quiet language so that the fire can be seen."

"[Ideas] come from day dreaming, from drifting, that moment when you’re just sitting there… The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored. I’m much better at putting my phone away, going for boring walks, actually trying to find the space to get bored in. That’s what I’ve started saying to people who say 'I want to be a writer,' I say ‘great, get bored.'"

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut… If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write."

"Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees."

"The ugly fact is books are made out of books."

"If you find yourself thinking about something nonstop and noticing it everywhere, odds are you have something to say about it. Or at least a question to ask about it. And maybe you should be finding a way to communicate that to the world."

"To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it, seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph, mere stops."

"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

"We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to."

"The best time to write a story is yesterday. The next best time is today."

"It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one’s own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness."

"Never tell anyone that you're: writing a book, going on a diet, exercising, taking a course, or quitting smoking. They'll encourage you to death."

"A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it."