And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

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.

We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.

The difference being that in films, unlike in life, good does always win over evil in the end.

My thing is this; if I'm sick enough to think it, then I'm sick enough to say it.

The years leech at a man's memories, even those he has vowed never to forget.

Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

The role of an actor is to make every character believable.

I agree with Clyde Wilson that America can’t be saved or returned to its roots until the Republican Party is destroyed.

Honesty and interest are as intimately connected in the public as in the private code of morality.

I was in school studying civil engineering. A guy approached me on the street and said that I had a interesting look-very exotic. He told me I should try to be in the industry.

I write, I write, I always write.