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

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.

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

Running through things because you are familiar with them, breeds routine and this is the seed of boredom.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

Airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

The Beatles saved the world from boredom.

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.

I've made a career over the last seventeen years of mostly playing men in uniform, especially cops. The one thing for an actor that is death, is if you're bored. The boredom will show in your work.

There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever.

Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.

When we hold back out of laziness, that is when we tie ourselves into knots of boredom.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror.

You'll find boredom where there is the absence of a good idea.

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

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.

Our only competition in the theater is boredom, because if I'm bored with a play, if I'm revolted by a play on stage, with the Broadway prices, especially today, I'm going to walk out and not come back and pay that price again.

As actors, the thing we have to fight, more than even the business part of making movies, is boredom.

People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.