While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.

I get a lot of letters from people. They say "I want to be a writer. What should I do?" I tell them to stop writing to me and to get on with it.

I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

It's living - a broad spectrum of living - that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.

We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.

the English, although partakers in the most variable and quixotic climate in the world, never become used to its vagaries, but comment upon them with shock and resentment as if all their lives had been spent in the predictable monsoon.