“I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.”

You get your inspiration – suggestions – wherever you have to, even from your mother.

Those books of mine that are remunerative – I’m not talking about poetry here – take years to write, and I am never sure they’ll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people’s lives, the lives of people you don’t know, and you want to know what’s going to happen to them.

You will get what you want but you must want it and not just wish it.

I want my books to sell, to be read. I’m not interested in being obscure.

God save us from people who mean well.

My eyes close. I am here and not here. A waking nap? A flight to the end of the galaxy and perhaps a couple of billion light-years beyond?

I am certainly not allergic to causes – particularly on subjects such as religious intolerance.

Dear though the reader might be, I’d be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.

Don’t put things off till it’s too late. You are the DJ of your fate.

Think of many things. Never place your happiness in one person’s power. Be just to yourself.

In a painting, you can’t make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist’s stroke.

For a writer, obsession is a good substitute for self-discipline.

I think if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And worth thinking about it as well.

I think goodness is about how person behaves to person, and also person to world, to nature.

You can talk good ideas out of existence.

There is no great book than the elders of the home.

Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed’ is the title of the book.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Declutter is the first chapter in the book of minimalism.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.