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.

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 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.

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

He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave.

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don't leave until you have captured its essence.

.be happy now, not when..

Communism is Christianity castrated by Ockham's Razor.

The tea was a comfort - and by that time I more than needed comfort.

After watching that, I gotta admit, I am awesome!

In the end we just realize there's no end. It just goes on forever, in countlessly new forms. That's what's wonderful about the universe there's no escape from living. Death doesn't even end it.

One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.

Revenge is the single most satisfying feeling in the world!