Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

Kept falling in and out of it [sleep] like out of a boat or a tipping hammock.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.