If pride is a sin ... moral pride is the greatest sin.

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.

I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size.

The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.