The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

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.

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.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

Success is the result of your struggling

Think positively.Always focus on the positive side of any situation.

I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me.

But the question is, whether the animals who endure such sufferings of various kinds for the service and entertainment of man, would accept existence upon the terms on which they have it.

When we were together, she turned me completely inside out.

You watch a hockey game, and the hand-eye coordination and the speed is really miraculous; how those guys track the puck alone, just following it with their eyes.

Careless their merits or their faults to scan, His pity gave ere charity began. Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride, And even his failings lean'd to Virtue's side.

I told you, the dopes are gonna inherit the earth anyway.

When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he himself means, that is philosophy.