I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.

Study to learn, do not study to pass".

The secret of being happy is not longing for it!

If you can't hurt the other person at least once a day, then you've got no relationship.

I wrote a lot of poetry that was based on stories of the sea and I was really inspired by that.

For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times.

If you are in an improv jazz ensemble or a small chamber group, you learn to think fast on your feet and how to be flexible and to collaborate and compromise, and that may yield a creative outcome.

In Europe art has to a large degree taken the place of religion. In America it seems rather to be science.

That's one thing about me: I'm not greedy. I buy things for my friends if I buy them for myself. I make sure my friend's rent is paid.

Without a reading habit, children simply do not have a chance.