Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

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.

There was a family joke that Lucy's first words were, "Nicholas is bugging me!

A tiny home with love was better than a world without it.

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

Other than vaccines and finding a cure, most funding goes toward putting people on treatment. That's completely valid and I understand that, but it's never how we're going to stop AIDS.

I think a whole lot of stuff gets by people - I could name half a dozen groups that do songs that are openly supportive of experimentation with drugs, nobody ever said anything to them.

When one sense has been bribed the others readily bear false witness.

Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.

Mankind does not drink alcohol because there are breweries, distilleries, and vineyards; men brew beer, distill spirits, and grow grapes because of the demand for alcoholic drinks.

I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day.