What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.

I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead.

One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to do that.

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.

I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.

My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.