I’m too shy for personal appearances, and I’ve found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can’t do any writing for many weeks afterward.

I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you’re with them.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine – what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.

Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call...

I don’t want to say I hear voices; well, actually I do hear voices, but I don’t think it’s supernatural. I think it’s just that when characters are given enough texture and backbone, then lo...

Face it,’ I said. ‘There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you’ve got,’ I...

I’ve always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

I’ve never quite believed that one chance is all I get

II would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a though about publication — and only in the last draft to consider...

When I’m working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.

Ghosts… they are the completions of the deads intended gestures, there unfinished plans still hanging in the air – something like when you forgot one thing and so you pantomime the motion.

I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I’ll have used up all my characters, and then I’ll be free to get on with my real life.

People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.

Ah, God, it’s barbaric, however you look at it,’ he told Ruth.’What, cremation?’ she asked.’Death.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all.