Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

As soon as I started writing Julia, by which I mean while writing its first sentence, I felt a sudden, reassuring charge of excitement. I knew it was going to work.

I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.

Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.

I had a connoisseur's... appreciation of fear.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

If I planned everything out in advance, I'd expire of boredom.

When, in the third book, we do learn the identity of the Blue Rose murderer, the information comes in a muted, nearly off-hand manner, and the man has died long before.

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.

Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.

Each new book is a tremendous challenge.

There have been times when I reread - or at least leafed through - something because I'd sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite.

However, I think I managed to reach a new level with Koko, and I will always be grateful for the experience.

On gym days, I don't get to my desk until 4 in the afternoon, and everything except bedtime and the appointment with the liquid narcotic is pushed back a bit.

Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

Dick Dart emerged from the ether during a flight from New York with my wife and children to Puerto Rico.

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm.

My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan's Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

The old ways of teaching are slow and expensive. But with mobile, cost plummets, access broadens, and pedagogy rises.

Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.

My issue in the past with nudity was that these scenes had been written solely for box office draw.

You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.

I had to make my history quick because there would be no future, merely a gossamer world blown about on the zeitgeist, till zeitgeist, the wind of the times, is blasted away by kamikaze, the wind of God.

In the House, Republican prospects have been buoyed by several successful rounds of redistricting, which have sharply reduced the number of competitive seats and given the Republicans a national advantage of at least a dozen seats.

The ugly can be beautiful. The pretty, never.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself

My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

I guess what I've always wanted was someone who loves me enough to match my effort.

Above all else, never think you're not good enough.

I looked along the San Juan Islands and the coast of California, but I couldn't find the palette of green, granite, and dark blue that you can only find in Maine.

In the evening of the first day my father conducted us to the public baths.

I think everyone expects if you're in the lead, or if you're a favourite to win, you will win, and if you don't, then you're in a slump. It's not the case.

When you're playing against a whole bunch of All-Stars, it's like a video game. There's so much talent on the floor at once.

For every individual who really is exceptional there are about fifty thousand who just imagine they are until its too late and they find out they arent after all.

Be larger than your task.

Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.

There are times when I'm under the weather and the corporate machine tries to put me in the recording booth anyway. It's always up to me to say, 'Guys, listen to me, listen to what I sound like. I'm not myself.'

Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.

Therefore, vegetarianism alone can give us the quality of com-passion, which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world.

Asking anyone what she or he is reading is a necessary part of conversation, exchanging news. So I take recommendations from friends - and I always pass along a book I've loved.

I was what? - twelve years old - and I was thrown in the cells with these people, so I learned fast.

There are no black and white, good or bad characters in 'Game Of Thrones,' but Joffrey was an exception. Just pure evil.