“One Minus One’”and “Barcelona, 1975” are more or less autobiographical.

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.

At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.

Revenge is possible only if you spare the enemy.

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.

If you're born once, you die twice; but if you're born twice, you die once.

If you see a door to happiness, do not waste your time knocking it, just open the door and walk in!

An astounding thing is that, almost every single week, I have met someone from my past.

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

I was always the lead role in plays. I like entertaining people. I like when you're on stage doing crazy stuff and the audience gets it.

I was lucky to get one good adaptation. Field of Dreams the Musical is lurking in the wings. Hope it will provide my daughters with a ton of money someday.