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.

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

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.

Swimming always cleans your soul

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.

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.