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.

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.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

togetherness brings progress.

The better you get at your key skills, the more you accomplish in a shorter period of time.

Aging can be fun if you lay back and enjoy it.

Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.

Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

Losing is the great American sin.

To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection

Death, in its silent sure march is fast gathering those whom I have longest loved, so that when he shall knock at my door, I will more willingly follow.

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.