I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

What you're constantly seeking isn't a style, but a transparency between your soul and the words. And your soul is ever in flux, so therefore you have to constantly find new forms of words that might be able to register these changes in the soul.

Murder and hate are as deeply buried in the human heart as love, perhaps more so, and in truth they're rather entwined, and if you tried to separate them, you'd be missing something important and human.

Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions.

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.