This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home.

I don't know anyone who actually likes the dark or night-time. I don't care how much they say it doesn't bother them. That's why we used to huddle in caves and light fires when the sun went down.

Having said that, I'm a huge Jack Nicholson fan because he just goes nuts in everything he does. Having Jack in his heyday would also be a dream come true.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

The joy of painting lies precisely in the challenge of memory and the challenge of translation from the lived experience to the two-dimensional or three-dimensional symbol.

Painting is a matter of finding the right balance between consoling and reassuring the eye and challenging and disturbing the eye.

Photos represent primarily a seductive but deleterious short cut.

The face of totalitarianism turned out to be a mask - obviously - but the face of Capitalism has no face at all.

Considering the amount of work I put into each piece, the amount I need to make from it is pretty high. I won't sell for less... but that means I rarely sell.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can’t be like any other author’s really.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Often, love is a tangled web of lies that only a broken heart would weave. Seldom is dishonesty the whole person, rather it's the pain.

LIKING WHAT YOU DO IS PLEASURE, DOING WHAT YOU LIKE IS PASSION.

It's not what you achieve, it's what you overcome. That's what defines your career.

I think title sequences are an opportunity to sort of set the stage or to get people thinking in different terms than maybe whatever they understand the movie to be going in.

Great Spirit, When we face the sunset when we come singing the last song, may it be without shame, singing 'it is finished in beauty, it is finished in beauty!'

Never dip lower than you can dip.

Now it stands to reason, mister, any damn fool stares into the sun long enough, he'll end up seeing exactly what some other damn fool tells him he's going to see.

Private victories precede public victories. You can't invert that process any more than you can harvest a crop before you plant it.

Failure means you've now learned another valuable lesson that pushes you one step closer to success.

Like Scarlett O'Hara, I won't be broke again.