Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".

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.

A fool is someone who wants you to apologise for your intelligence -rassool jibraeel snyman

The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy.

No man is born unto himself alone; Who lives unto himself, he lives to none.

Don't run away from the world. The world is God. Don't run towards the world. God is the void. Don't be afraid of the complexities of this life, nor the stark simplicity of death.

If people want to pigeon hole you then just view it as an opportunity to prove them wrong and show that you are different to what they think you are.

Mortification is the soul's vigorous opposition to self, wherein sincerity is most evident.

that sunlight of the dead which is called literature.

Asia's governments come in two broad varieties: young, fragile democracies - and older, fragile authoritarian regimes.

Where's the line between professional girlfriend, and just plain professional?

Remember that no one succeeds alone. Never walk alone in your future paths.