I'm not one of those people who as a writer lets my characters tell me what they want to do or call to me or seek me. I go seeking for things, using them as an agent, really.

Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

Some idiotic things are well worth doing.

Your life doesn't mean what you have or what you get. Its what your'e willing to give up.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.

Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.

The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.

You can never connect on a deeper level if you idolise someone - you don't see the real person.

You can't point a camera at someone and find out what's in their head. But it does the next best thing - it lets you speculate.

Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.

I have never met a successful person that was a quitter. Successful people never, ever, give up!

Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!I am so weary of toil and of tears,-Toil without recompense, tears all in vain!Take them, and give me my childhood again!

Hey, we're like soldiers. Would you go to the Roman army and ask them if they thought they were going to win the battle? If I didn't think we could win, I wouldn't be here. I'd stay home and get fat.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.

I really wanted to study with Bruce Goff [one of the masters of "organic architecture"] at the University of Oklahoma.

For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.