Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.

All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.

When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.