“Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper.”

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they’re always with you because they’re a part of you.”

All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

What’s less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I’ve changed the cat little because I didn’t know what my characters were going to say next.

Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro.

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn’t speak for themselves.

Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you down!

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

But, in North Korea, it’s just the opposite. There’s one story. It’s written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.

You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation.

I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can’t bring back anything to life.

The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.

I have always had this mentality because I hated to break anything on the car.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.