However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

i wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.

It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life.

Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.

For M & B.Should you ever get to read this, to remind you that when life offers you a challenge:rise to the occasion.

Music is more fun when it's collaborative, in my opinion.

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.

Life isn't about a hand-out. That's not what the NFL is about and that won't get you in the NFL or take care of you once you're out of the NFL. You have to work.

Magic teaches us how to lie without guilt.

Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell.

The right-hander is throwing up in the bullpen.

To him who disgraces his family life is no life, and to such a person there is no one a friend, neither while living nor when dead.