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.

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 surroundings.

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

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

Life should be embraced like a lover.

I'm not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I'm always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories.

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

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

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

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 head - is barely formed yet.

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 time for the initial research.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

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 novels, male as well as female.

Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel.

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.

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 powers can enable it to be.

I can be stupid in my lyrics or say whatever I want without having to worry about anybody else's feeling or anybody being embarrassed by it or anything like that.

Always, if you win mentally, you can win physically as well.

If it's just screaming - and I know this sounds so ridiculous - that gets old. But sometimes when there's literal chaos, it's like being in a war zone, and that's kind of exciting. You're just running through the crowd of people chasing after you and no one knows what's going on.

Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you.

When you come in to court as a plaintiff or as a defendant, it is terribly important that you look up at the bench and feel that that person represents you and will understand you, that that person is reflective of our community and of our society.

A young woman hiking alone in the mountains sounds dangerous. In the pre-cell phone era maybe it was, but I'll stop short of calling it foolish.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.

I was only a bridesmaid for my sister, and it was very calm and small, so I didn't have any tragedy.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

My favourite thing is to discover what someone does well and say, 'Do that for me.'

I came from a hospitality background and saw that 80 percent of seats in cars weren't occupied most of the time.

The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.

I was sad to see anybody leave, we had a very nice family on that show. I was very sad to see momma go, Victoria and especially Linda. My god that was my wife on the show, in fact my wife calls her wife.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

The virtue of the civil partnerships scheme lay in the attempt to treat the needs of gay and lesbian couples as what they are, not to bundle them into some other category.

Professionally, I did a couple of operas when I was in school, when I was 18.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

Today America lost a great elder statesman, a committed public servant, and leader of the Senate. And today I lost a treasured friend. Ted Kennedy was an iconic, larger than life United States senator whose influence cannot be overstated. Many have come before, and many will come after, but Ted Kennedy's name will always be remembered as someone who lived and breathed the United States Senate and the work completed within its chamber.

I'm direct, I'm unpretentious and I'm pretty dogged, and I hope I've got a capacity to laugh at myself and not take myself too seriously.

It's very easy for people to put out music.

Photography used to be not for the faint of heart. Its rigors would weed out the not-so-committed pretty quickly. You had to crank the f-stop ring yourself!

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Scandinavia is boring. People living there apparently have little to do. And as European history teaches, when there is nothing much to do, you may as well amuse yourself by attacking the Jews.

I start work by spending time in personal Bible study. Because my projects center on a question in my own faith walk, I find Bible study essential. And God gives me scriptures daily that speak to the question with which I'm struggling.