Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

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

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.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.