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.

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

Nostalgia is a longing for your home.

The curiousity and to be interested in something makes you genius.(Robin Sharma said this once, in other words which will mean that to be genius or clever you must be curious to learn!)

No one can be all things, as we all know.

The woman suffrage movement in the United States was a movement of the spirit of the Revolution which was striving to hold the nation to the ideals which won independence.

I think things get a lot better after high school. I think the ones that struggle during that time tend to have better experiences after.

The solitary monk who shook the world From pagan slumber, when the gospel trump Thunder' d its challenge from his dauntless lips In peals of truth.

I never went to the gym before in my life. But, at 32, I notice that my body responds negatively to bad food, so I must make double the effort.

When I was 16 and wanted to be an actor, people told me to go work at the supermarket.