I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.

I hope I will get to novelize my present circumstances at some point. I have some great stories to tell.

Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.

One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually fiction is just better.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

I was very disciplined when home - lights out for the girls at 9:00, two hours of writing for me. It was murder on my marriage.

History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

Fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.

If a scene is longer than three pages, it better be for a good reason.

We can't feel safe because we are not safe. (on Fulham, 2004-5 season)

I'm a very romantic and passionate guy.

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons.

The notion of the single man began in the 1950's. The idea of the bachelor as a separate life was new and obscure.

I've always liked doubles. When you scald the ball on a line to the gap, I think that's about as close to a perfect swing as you can get.

The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

The solution to your problem is to see who has it.