A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

Kept falling in and out of it [sleep] like out of a boat or a tipping hammock.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

If all I cared about was me, I could make a million. And that's what they will never understand.

Love is the smallest part of gallantry.

It is the happiness of heaven to have God be all in all.

There are moments in your life when you see yourself through someone else’s eyes, when your only hope of believing you’re capable of doing something is because someone else believes it for you.

You can only be in a bad mood for so long before you have to face up to the fact that it isn't a bad mood at all; it's just your sucky personality.

There's always going to be space for battle in hip hop. For competition. It's just an inseparable part of the game.

I'm a person that can get along with people. I like people who believe passionately in things even if they're not the things I agree with.

It's clear that other problems such as [...] the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software.

In America there are some places that are just gorgeous to play.