Life is not a dress rehearsal..

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your ….

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my he….

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it..

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 power….

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

So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary ….

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my no….

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

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for w….

Kept falling in and out of it [sleep] like out of a boat or a tipping hammock..

Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have ….

Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers"..

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to m….

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow ….

There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is fre….

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along wit….

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real su….

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all..

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write..

Life should be embraced like a lover..