At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.

In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.

A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?

The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.

The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.

AUM or Om is not related to any religion because Om was practiced before the birth of all the religions of the world.

Don't worry about what you can't do, do what you can do!

Light — i.e. space — is the structure of time, the essence of existence. The stuff of physics does not involve time. Orthodox contemporary physics sadly refers to this fact as “the problem of time.

I'm trying to get away from trashing women, to be honest. I think I've done enough of that in my career.

I'm not a fighter. I'm not a tough guy at all. I walk away from fights.

If I don't die in a plane crash or something, this country has a rare opportunity to watch a great talent grow.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn't even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.

I feel I have had a very interesting life, but I am rather hoping there is still more to come. I still haven't captained the England cricket team, or sung at Carnegie Hall!

I think a lot of singer-songwriters get compared to each other, but I'd like to think that what I'm doing is special and specific to me.

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.