Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.

I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.