The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

it's amazing what you can get used to.

I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.

One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.