In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

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.

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.

Brother Wolf gave Anna an amused look and then went back to being scary.

Work is more fun than fun.

The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

If I had taken my doctor's advice and quit smoking when he advised me to, I wouldn't have lived to go to his funeral.

We are our choices.

When I grow up I am going to be a ballerina. I will be in Giselle. It will be so much fun being a ballerina.

I love to go back and write and direct another film one day, but that's on the backburner for now because I'm involved with so much television at the moment.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

Pity is akin to love.