When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.