Maybe we're stuck with who we are.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

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

I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!

There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.

Little children are all writers.

I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.

Religion is the product of organizations called churches

The British press isn't as vicious as it used to be, and these days it's sort of cool to care again. Everyone loves an everyman anthem.

I wasn't the guy who got straight As. I got As and Bs and a couple Cs.

When men in secular life, who might be religious or not, see women being treated as secondary in the eyes of God, they assume that it's OK for them to do it.

You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.

One of the most dynamic and significant changes you can make in your life is to make the commitment to drop all negative references to your past, to begin living now.

Wait by the river long enough and the body of your enemy will float by you.

The anxiety of most parents in seeing their sons and daughters enlist does not lie only in the fear of the physical dangers they may encounter.