They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction. 'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.

Writing a novel is like heading out over the open sea in a small boat. It helps, if you have a plan and a course laid out.

One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.

When people are serving, life is no longer meaningless.

...ultimately it come down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win. If you don't, you may make a fortune in ten years, but you're not going to be read in twenty years, and that's that.

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.