I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.

Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.

Money is an inanimate object. It can do good works or bad works depending on the hands that wield it, and the hearts governing those hands.

..things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.

Security ... it's simply the recognition that changes will take place and the knowledge that you're willing to deal with whatever happens.

I'm glad Carol Vorderman has left Countdown, I mean it's not like she did much. She was effectively just an autistic shelf-stacker.

A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality.

What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation.