At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.

You'll call me damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of Christian children. How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things. The only mercy of children is that they grow up, as my son has but then, tragically, they beget more children. We do not learn life's lessons.

Madness ends sometimes. The Gods decree it, not man.

Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.

Book tours and research provide a lot of travel - too much, I sometimes think, but we do take vacations.

The existence of tricks does not imply the absence of magic.

We don't build,' I said to my son, 'we just destroy.