I'm almost completely without family and it's a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.

Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall'.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.

I like to read either in motion or in water... I am happiest reading in the bathtub.

When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.