People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else

I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window.

To know you will be lonely is not the same as being lonely.

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.

I'm interested in where we are, where we're going, where we've come from.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.