I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.