I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.

I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.

The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field.

The world is divided up into two kinds of people - those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don't.

The professional guts a book through - in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve.

There are two types of people ... the scrutinizers and the scrutinized

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind.

Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.

Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier.

And I see that his brown eye has a splash of green in it and the green one a splash of brown. Like Cezanne painted them. Impressionist eyes.

I know what I want. I will chase to it.

Peace does not walk up to our doorsteps and press the calling bell! We have to go out there and search for it.

Thus in Christianity the alienation had become total, and it was this total alienation that was the biggest obstacle to the progress of self-consciousness.

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.

In the States, I learned to fight for every idea. Sometimes, a director has to be a tyrant to keep the quality.

The trouble with the British is that they are not interested in ideas. If Jesus came back today and offered to speak for an hour on British television, they would say, "What! Another talking head?

As we are set free by that love from our own pride and fear, our own greed and arrogance, so we are free in our turn to be agents of reconciliation and hope, or healing and love.

Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.

Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.