When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false... In most instances, they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth.

I always carry a sketchbook around with me, and I sketch whenever I can... I might be in a financial review and be sketching because I find that I actually listen better when I sketch. Truth be told, there are probably more sketches in my books than there are written notes.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.

Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.

What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.

I actually feel I'm in a much better place than I've ever been because I'm thankful people still love the songs that I've written, and they seem to like me. And they come to the shows in droves, and they get all excited, and I can still hit all the notes, and I don't look terrible.

My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!

Personally, I had a great education. My mum was a trained teacher, a Montessori teacher, and I know that I could not have written 'Eragon' if I had gone into a public school system because I would have just been too busy attending classes and doing homework - I wouldn't have had the time to write.

I want to clear up a few myths about myself. People have written that I was a kindergarten teacher and a former Miss Texas, and neither is true.

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.

'Life's That Way' was an extraordinarily difficult book to write, because it wasn't written as a book. It was written as a journal of events that were happening as I wrote it, without the space or time either to digest or analyze those events and without the hindsight and peace that writing in the aftermath would have provided.

I've only ever written about one thing in my life, which is the fact that we, as human beings, have a responsibility to one another and that it's important that we empathize with others, that we organize society so that we all become happier and we all get the life we really want.

Someone who does an act. In a democratic society, you're supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate. It could be a letter written to an editor.

What I always think about when I think about 'Girls' is Lena being in a scene where she's very vulnerable, possibly directing, acting, and she's probably written the dialogue. It's 2 in the morning. Everyone's tired. Everyone's grumpy. And she has a smile on her face and kindness for everyone who interacts with her.

While journalists cannot right every wrong, champion every cause or fix every problem, they can - through the written word - lift someone's burden for a day, make some elderly woman on a bus smile or let them know they are noticed by someone.

By coincidence and not design, 'Everstar' is written and drawn by an all-female creative team, and it makes me smile to think that there may be young female readers out there, future writers and artists, who get to see that comics doesn't have to be a 'boys' club.'

All of the narration in 'Smile' is first-person. Most of the books that I grew up reading had first-person narrators for some reason. My diaries were written in this voice, and since this story is autobiographical, it just felt like a natural extension.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.

Any sufficiently badly-written science is indistinguishable from magic.

I found out about reviews early on. They're mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That's probably why I'm less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.