Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.

My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.

First comes an idea. Then, characters begin to evolve out of the landscape of that idea. And then, finally, characters dominate: plot is simply a function of what these people might do or be. Everything has to flow from their personalities; otherwise it will not be emotionally engaging, or plausible.

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.

History is too important to be left to the historians.