When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

We read to know that we are not alone.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn fast.

God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.

I am as I am. The world is as it is. Whether I am content with that has very little to do with it.

I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me.

My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books.

The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad.

A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.

Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.

The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.

The self may be extinguished, but there are many selves and the Will creates them.

Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room.

Criticism ... makes very little dent upon me unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

A vacation is like love - anticipated with pleasure, experienced with discomfort, and remembered with nostalgia.

The thing that I'm most passionate about, I'm writing a book called 'Jab Jab Jab Jab Jab Right Hook,' and it really focuses on how to story-tell in a noisy, ADD world.

We all give ourselves a lot of leeway, but we want consistency from other people.

The Guardians wouldn't abandon the last Dragomir. And I wouldn't have abandoned Lissa even if there were a million Dragomirs.

I feel culturally Jewish because of the way that I have lived my adult life.