Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

Kept falling in and out of it [sleep] like out of a boat or a tipping hammock.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

If two people who love each other Ares soul mates, then there will always be a empty hole in my soul waiting for you..

It's not always enough to be brave, I realized years later. You have to be brave and contribute something positive, too. Brave on its own is just a party trick.

Pity is woman's sweetest charm.

It's better to become who God created you to be than to try to promote yourself to become something you're not.

I wanted more in depth ideas about the character and it never came.

The safest place to be is always halfway into your future, without even knowing what it is.

Al-Qaeda has a kind of loose, almost entrepreneurial structure with lots of cells in various countries that are semi-independent.

I won the first contest I ever entered, when I was 6.

I myself am a very nonviolent person and only resort to violence when I absolutely have to.

Swing at the strikes.