My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life.

People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Routine kills creative thought.

Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.

What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.

I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.

One of the biggest problems for beginning writers is this need to over-explain.

But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives.

Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.

Freedom. It's like no constraints, an opening, and then barriers going away and lifting and breaking and experimentation and...it's like attempting for something.

If venereal delight and the power of propagating the species were permitted only to the virtuous, it would make the world very good.

The thing I try to do the most is to play in terms of the song and play in terms of what I'm hearing.

Everyone is more focused on presenting the best that the league has to offer, rather than the worst.

Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?

That's been my sort of aim in life, to never miss an opportunity.

Bob Dylan truly is a poet whose song is part of the poetry.

We climbers have much to learn from the training done in conventional sports.