I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has. That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."[The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

File under "Hard Truths": the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Early on I set out to write the next Great American Novel, and then later on I set out the silverware and enjoyed my dinner in silence.

Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.