If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

Things are going to go wrong, and I think we are false to life if we don’t portray it. But there is also the hope that some lucky clown is going to come along and stumble into the gold mine. And I think you are also entitled to hold out that hope.

The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.

On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years.

You have to be eligible for luck to strike, and I think that's a matter of education and preparation, and character and all the other solid attributes that sometimes people laugh at.