I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.

I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick.

If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.

I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day.

I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.

There's never a bad time to put earplugs in. They're the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplugs and it turned out to be great advice.

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.

Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?

You is not you until you see the path of your faith.

I think naturally, if you're an actor, there's a high level of assertiveness that you need to have to survive this business. There's boldness in being assertive, and there's strength and confidence.

Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether incalculable.

Of all ills that one endures, hope is a cheap and universal cure.

Failure isn't in not reaching your goal but in having no goal to reach.

I began my career in Los Angeles and started working fairly quickly.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

I normally live in Los Angeles, if you can call it normal living.

Basic Instincts It's the way mother birds build nests, and build them high enough to elude