This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.

I hate birthdays.

I see so much more than I used to see. The effect has been to depress and sadden and hurt me terribly.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

I need this wild life, this freedom.

I am full of fire and passion. I am not ready yet for great concentration and passion.

I will see this game of life out to its bitter end.

I love my work but do not know how I write it.

The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.

I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.

Men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things.

I am tired. My arm aches. My head boils. My feet are cold. But I am not aware of any weakness.

I wrote for nearly six hours. When I stopped, the dark mood, as if by magic, had folded its cloak and gone away.

The Indian story has never been written. Maybe I am the man to do it.

I arise full of eagerness and energy, knowing well what achievement lies ahead of me.

What is writing but an expression of my own life?

I confess that reading proofs is a pleasure. It stimulates and inspires me.

What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death.

No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything.

There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.

I did not have one bad spell during writing - an unprecedented record.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

I must go deeper and even stronger into my treasure mine and stint nothing of time, toil, or torture.

It was a decent New Year's, but it took a million officers to make it so.

Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.

Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant, as the years multiply.

Love of man for woman - love of woman for man. That's the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.

Work is my salvation. It changes my moods.

This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.

These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.

Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant as the years multiply.

Then the wind blew cool through the pinyons on the rim. There was a sweet tang of cedar and sage on the air and that indefinable fragrance peculiar to the canyon country of Arizona.

If I fished only to capture fish my fishing trips would have ended long ago.

Love grows more tremendously full swift poignant as the years multiply.

Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.

My singing is my hobby. It's me and my brother. We just enjoy writing music.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.