In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.

For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.