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

The truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it.

She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.

Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.

Whenever it rains you will think of her.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

You made peace,” said the buffalo man. “You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the people who worshiped them were here—because it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will.