I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.