I want to write novels, and I want to write and direct theater.

My mother was a big reader, and my father was an editorial writer for a newspaper.

Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out their meaning for...

One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm...

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

I think the Queen enjoyed my book on her father, George VI.

I really liked writing rhyming poems and plays.

My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine.

I didn't even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn't afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local...

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

I'm struggling with what is epic. People decided I was epic - if by epic, do you mean a big, heavy book? 'David Copperfield' is a big book - is it epic? Amount of time covered, length, drama, or story...

I think I would have written more books if I'd had fewer kids or had them earlier, but I think the books in general would have had a little less spark to them.

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

Hamlet is the result of Shakespeare's work on Brutus.

For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in 'The Death-Ray' is based on somebody I went to high school with.

I think in some ways, you end up with more interesting storytelling with series, because if you've written yourself into a corner with something in book 1, you have to be cleverer to get out of it.

I would love to do Shakespeare in New York.

The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.

I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.

For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.

The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if...

We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.

You have to learn how to write each book.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

When I'm writing, I won't know whodunnit until maybe two thirds of the way through. Until then, I know as little as my detective. I just make it up as I go along. It's nerve-wracking, actually. You'll...