Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have I ever found them monstrous. They have many other qualities.

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.

During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.

I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.

How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is there reading makes it more.

People have different impressions of themselves, and where reality lies is somewhere in between.

Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.

Paradise is hidden in each one of use, it is concealed within me too, right now, and if I wish, it will come for me in reality, tomorrow even, and for the rest of my life.

The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

Fight fairly. Give generously. Laugh loudly. Love deeply.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

If (the antiproton) had not been discovered, the foundations of physics really would have crumbled.

For centuries men have kept an appointment with Christmas. Christmas means fellowship, feasting, giving and receiving, a time of good cheer, home.