I work with wood a lot. I like building. I think of building. I would love to buy land on some water somewhere and build a house. That'd be nice.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Art is so personal. I'm very comforted by the fact that certain movies that I love, other people hate. Certain books that I love, other people hate. You can't please everybody.

To have too much time is not good, you have to force yourself. And human beings aren't meant for true freedom. I've learned that, having had it.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.

I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.

You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

I have always thought that if women's hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.

God is in the best, and also the worst. God is in the presence, and also in the absence. God is in the power, and also in the powerlessness.

Whatever we do and are, we are given the means thereof

In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

We all played bad before we played good.

You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care.

I look back, and I've got a couple of films, and I'm happy.

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

Patriarchy is connected to greed, a symptom of a larger force that can only be dispelled through kindness and love. It's basic Buddhism.

There is a joy available that the deepest grief cannot put out. No circumstance or person can take away the joy God gives.