It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

It's such a silly little thing, the heart.

Acting is a very strange industry in that it flows in these weird ways, I'll be so busy for 6 months and then nothing for a couple months, so it's hard for me to focus and stuff.

It's also a lot easier to convince people to read an entertaining story than any other type of book!

I don't get along with anything, I really don't...I'm, I'm, maybe I'm just a, you know, incredibly tasteful human being.

I love being a writer in a medium where they have to ask you, 'Can I change this line?'

I know generals who disagree with [Barack] Obama, but I don't think these people are idiots or been reduced to rubble.

Every culture to me - be it Asian, African, be it whatever - is a source of reference. I don't think I'm 'stealing' it or anything.

The greatest revenge is massive success.

As water shapes its flow in accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy.