...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.

There's not a thing wrong with you, you're right the whole way through.

I needed to do a lot of saying no. I had a lot of [interest] from people who I just didn't think were quite right for it. And I didn't want a bad film to be made of the book, either a sentimental one or a creepy one, so I did a lot of, "No thank you." Then when the right filmmaker came along, yes, I suppose I presented myself very much as wanting to be the writer.

There are some tales not for telling, whether because they are too long, too precious, too laughable, too painful, too easy to need telling or too hard to explain. After all, after years and travels my secrets are all I have left to chew on in the night.

The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children.

Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I've had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you're trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only gradually complicate the explanation as they get older.

With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.