It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself.

Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote.

If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.

The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

Pirates have always fascinated me.

I never know where I am going, though. That is part of what makes it so wonderful. And after all, who does?

Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.

It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself.

At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.

I also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there's so much in those films and I don't care if it's stereotyped.

I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.

When I am fascinated by something, I like to play with it.

I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!

I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work.

I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.

People are always the start for me... animals, when I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings, immortals, the dead... these are all people to me.

I like films, or some films, and would be intrigued to see my work on screen.

I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.

No one is ever ordinary.

It gets cold in the desert at night particularly up in the mountains the stars hammer on the rock and strike frost.

The guilty are always the most prone to establish complementary guilt and the most unforgiving thereafter.

No one asks a robot what he wants.

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.

The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar.

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.

Writing, overall, has never been what I'd call fun. It's fulfilling. It doesn't come real easy for me.

Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.