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

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.

A person with great knowledge is truly wealthy.

Men have firm beautiful bodies with cut muscles. But the curves and gentleness of a woman’s body is beyond a words measure

I vote, I challenge Bathymaasy and we shoot arrows at you dearest brother." ArtemisSet and Bathymaas laughed.Apollo, not so much.

I am still praying for revolution.

The more things you own, the more people you need to employ.

Lord, forgive me if my need Sometimes shapes a human creed.

I cook British food, but it doesn't mean I'm jingoistic about it. People can cook very good fusion food.

The entire race is usually judged by the actions of one man or woman

Nothing jazzes me up like football. I've acquired more passion of the years, not less. Not to love it wouldn't make sense.

Feasts and business and pleasure and enjoyments seem great things to us, whilst we think of nothing else; but as soon as we add death to them they all sink into an equal littleness.