Life should be embraced like a lover.

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.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

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.

She had thought about that moment so often during the past few years it had dried out. It was stale, like old, odourless potpourri. But she still want back to it, because it was the only one.

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.

What I do . . . the path I tread . . . it brings some choices that test me hard.

What’s the best way to ensure your small business makes a profit? Without a doubt, it’s to keep your overhead costs low, and maximize your sales per marketing dollar.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud.

The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.

I actually studied Indian classical vocal music.

Lincoln said, 'With malice toward none, with charity to all.' Nowadays they say, 'Think the way I do or I'll bomb the daylights outta you.'

Discrimination is a disease.