“Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare”

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

I have accepted fear as a part of life – specifically the fear of change… I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.

Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I’m doing something right.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.

I don’t think you will ever fully understand how you’ve touched my life and made me who I am.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth)

Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.

Divorce is my generation’s coming of age ceremony – a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

Home is where your books are.

Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.

We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.

In loving life you love what can’t survive.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process–it is, after all, black magic.

Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn’t saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don’t know, but every character is an extension of the author’s own personality.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson.

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world – they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.