The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

i wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

We may believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity.

This is days and days and months and years and all the minutes in between, just you me.

That which is worth telling is not worth having.

The scientist is activated by a wonder and awe before the mysterious comprehensibility of the universe which is yet finally beyond his grasp. In its profoundest depths it is inaccessible to man.

Everything begins with the resolve to take the first step. From that action, wisdom arises and change begins. Without action, nothing changes.

A truly international field, no Britons involved.

Henceforth the adequacy of any military establishment will be tested by its ability to preserve the peace.

Always write from your gut, no matter what the project is.

I think that I'm always going to think that it's silly to value certain things that no matter how many people find it really valuable, it's always just going to seem a little silly to me.

In the old days, people robbed stagecoaches and knocked off armored trucks. Now they're knocking off servers.