“Get rid of those friends of yours who make fun of you and don’t believe in you. And when you leave here tonight, go home, make a phone call and fire them. Anyone that doesn’t believe in you and your future, to hell with them.”

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

Good to evil seems evil

If we try to deny the darkness in our souls then we’ll become completely dark.

Creativity is a continual surprise.

You can make yourself happy or miserable – it’s the same amount of effort.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

You fail only if you stop writing.

You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

There’s no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it’s immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

Sin is believing the lie that you are self-created, self-dependent and self-sustained.

I truly, truly believe that beauty is something that comes from within.

I don’t care if the whole world is against you or teasing you or saying you are not gonna make it. Believe in yourself, no matter what.

God gave me this illness to remind me that I’m not Number One; He is.

You tried, you failed, you believed & in the end you are an inspiration for the nation.

Those are shrines. Some people believe spirits live in them.

They can because they think they can.

I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.