Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business.

Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy.

I think radio plays are my favourite medium, as they make the listener work and create and contribute in a way that TV and film can never do, and they have an immediacy that written prose often lacks.

The war had begun and nobody saw it. The storm was lowering and nobody knew it.

I think if you decide that any book is about Only One Thing you're probably wrong. Even if that thing is in there.