To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

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.

The true currency of life is time, not money, and we've all got a limited stock of that.

Storytelling has a narcotic power.

Golf requires only a few simple Rules and Regulations to guide the players in the true nature of its sporting appeal. The spirit of the game is its own referee.

A police state is a country run by criminals

Working 14 hours a day until you're 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.