It is exciting to write about the present once one gets beyond the trivia of the moment. As a time to live in, as a time to think about, the present is intriguing.

To not be able to love the one you love is to have your life wrenched away.

Fiction basically is a form of gossip where you want to enter other people's lives, the lives of people you don't know, and you want to know what's going to happen to them.

I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.

I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.

I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

It's not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.