Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Morrocan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating, by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer's make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road he wants to go. I would only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.

See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream.

No person ever died that had a family.

But souls can't be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.