More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.

Kenneth Branagh. There was a time in my life when people would tell me constantly that I look like him. I could do a lot worse than that.

New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.

You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a year ago, I can't believe he's doing this.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.

Courage is found in unlikely places.

Jesus said his disciples would be known for their love, not for their placards of protest and angry letters to the editor.

It had been a whim, and there was nothing Magnus attached more importance to than a whim.

Writing should beguile us, not just take us from A to B to Zzzzz

I tell you not to be timid. I tell you to make the choices, make the mistakes, big, terrible, reckless mistakes, really screw it all up. I tell you it is the only way.

To Control Is Better Check.Petra Cecilia Maria HermansAugust 19, 2016Babaji

We have two hundred languages in Europe. Two hundred languages! Count them! I know you won't!

BUT MY RECENT RESEARCH HAS SHOWN ME THAT FEMINISM HAS BECOME AN UNPOPULAR WORD. WOMEN ARE CHOOSING NOT TO IDENTIFY AS FEMINISTS.

When I was playing, my wife and kids would go on the road with me, and we would go to different lunch spots that we saw on "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives."

Any trend that is developed too fast and is disposed right away is not going to have a lasting impression on the culture, you know?