There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be.

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.

Disappointments are to the soul what a thunderstorm is to the air.

Leaders have the right to expect that others will compassionately recognize them.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

I'm not sure you learn anything on film sets.

In all earlier civilizations, it should be remembered, commerce was treated as a narrow activity and by no means the senior sector in society.

A great deal of learning can be packed into an empty head.

Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.

We are unhappy because we no longer have our self esteem. We are unhappy, because we no longer believe we are a special miracle, a special creation of God. We have lost faith in ourselves.

The natural law is the origin and principle of all virtues and their acts, therefore we must first speak about natural law.

I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.