“Writing is tiring and difficult, but I can sit at my desk for hours and hours, writing through the night to dawn. I never had any prior writing experience, but I learned that it’s not about using heavy vocabulary, and more about how I can express my sincerity.”

“My approach to politics is that I never said I'm smart. But why aren't I allowed to write about my experience?”

“I write the lyrics first, then the music," he says. "I don't want to try to be someone I'm not, because people easily see through that. So I only write about my own experiences, things I know and enjoy. Like my pets. I can't write about lovey or coupley things.”

“My guitar is like my best friend. My guitar can get me through anything. If I can sit down and write an amazing song with my guitar about what's going on in life, then that's the greatest therapy for me.”

“I had gone thoroughly through some of the all-fiction magazines and I made up my mind that if people were paid for writing such rot as I read I could write stories just as rotten. Although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.
I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, there are 31 books on my list. I had never met an editor, or an author or a publisher. l had no idea of how to submit a story or what I could expect in payment. Had I known anything about it at all I would never have thought of submitting half a novel; but that is what I did.
Thomas Newell Metcalf, who was then editor of The All-Story magazine, published by Munsey, wrote me that he liked the first half of a story I had sent him, and if the second half was as good he thought he might use it. Had he not given me this encouragement, I would never have finished the story, and my writing career would have been at an end, since l was not writing because of any urge to write, nor for any particular love of writing. l was writing because I had a wife and two babies, a combination which does not work well without money.”

“I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist.”

“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.

[, New York Times, April 19, 1992]”

“I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.”

“When I was a kid, I had dyslexia. And I would write about it in my dairy.”

“It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.”