Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

To seek is to show valor. To endure is to show strength. To believe all will arise in a time of perfection. There shows trust and faith in you.

I'm a perfectionist and if I start making changes, I'll never stop.

When I say I hate nostalgia, I hate things set in the recent past where everything is shiny and new.

The Admiralty said it was a plane and not a boat, the Royal Air Force said it was a boat and not a plane, the Army were plain not interested.

Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.

Ice cream was my undoing, and six chocolate milk shakes in a row were nothing to me at one time.

Round and round we spin, with feet of lead and wings of tin.

Practically everyone is going to have a general purpose computer in their pocket, it's so easy to underestimate that, that has got to be the really, really big one.

It's hard to be reverent today when directors make films that are not as good. There will be time later, though, when their lesser films are forgotten and just focus on the greatness.