The moment you lose curiosity in the world, you might as well be dead.

Screenwriting is an opportunity to fly first class, be treated like a celebrity, sit around the pool and be betrayed.

When anything can happen, everything matters.

I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.

I think the novel, its business is the investigation of human nature.

Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?