Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

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.

To be able to see into a friends' dream is a dream in itself.-Doctor Kōsaku Tokita (Paprika)

They were two people staring at each other knowingly, communicating psychically amidst an ocean of deaf, dumb and blind meatsacks.

I'd die for your sins, but I'd probably enjoy them first

Sometimes my brain writes a check that reality can't cash.

If anyone is unhappy, remember that his unhappiness is his own fault... Nothing else is the cause of anxiety or loss of tranquility except our own opinion.

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence.

Playing in an independent rock band will eventually make you equal parts truck driver, gladiator and mule. Glamour is for those with trust funds.

John Cleese was with a group called Cambridge Circus, who had come to New York, and we became friends. Years later that produced a certain team effort.

To hell with the Constitution when people want coal!

I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.