When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

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.

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.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

The more you have seen, the larger your cognitive map, the more you can imagine.

The true hero is one who conquers his own anger and hatred.

The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Life is the childhood of immortality.

Check out that one at the end. He's taken the form of a footstool. Weird...but somehow I like his style." "That is a footstool.

I'm not big into the caveman look like some guys are. But I think it's pretty awesome that guys are more attuned to themselves and making beards a part of their style.

Even if the song meant a lot to me, I would still probably perform it live.

The basic premise of my system is to fatigue your opponents with constant pressure defensively and constant movement offensively.

I can make a movie about Lee Harvey Oswald and make you feel what he feels and make you understand why he believes what he believes. That doesn't mean I think you should go out and shoot JFK.

You can't get to a balanced budget and begin to pay down debt and thus create jobs in this country if you don't have specific plans to make it work.