I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.

And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.

It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.

I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.

It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.

But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

I get up around 6:30. I work from about 8:00 to 1:00, take a break for lunch, work again until about 5:00, and then go for a long walk and have dinner. Then, if my wife and I have no previous plans, we decide what to do for the evening.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.

And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

Well, in The Chosen, Danny Saunders, from the heart of his religious reading of the world, encounters an element in the very heart of the secular readings of the world - Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.

A blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks that is something.

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.

Even when I'm writing plays I enjoy having company and mentally I think of that company as the company I'm writing for.

My singing is my hobby. It's me and my brother. We just enjoy writing music.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

Writing songs has a therapeutic effect, and it either kills off love or wins the heart of the lover.

Writing novels is the most exciting.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

Now I'm kind of established as a director, I much prefer directing to writing.