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.

Here are a few of the actors who have brought my novels to TV life: Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand, Julian Sands, Gena Rowlands, Rob Lowe, Julia Ormond, Chelsea Hobbs, Tate Donovan,...

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young,...

I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether...

I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.

We read our children stories starring elephants and monkeys and bears to teach them about nobility, curiosity and courage, to warn them against selfishness and stubbornness.

At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf...

At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

If it's a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means...

In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free...

This was a lucky recollection - - it saved her from something like regret.

Above all mediums, through which storytelling is conveyed, none has the potential to draw us in, to hold us spellbound, but the unassuming book.

He glared at Lucian in the manner of birds, first peering through one eye and then turning his head to peer through the other, apparently finding both views equally loathsome.

The two of them together in a place like Retribution Falls would result in alcoholic carnage, sure as bird shit on statues.

At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.

Jack reads too many books. He thinks we're going to drive all year and have great adventures.

Maybe there is no guile here," Deor suggested. "Perhaps it is just a group of dragons who have come together to raid the hold." "The difference? If they pretend to cooperate ... they must cooperate to...

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper...

It's no disgrace to be black, but it's often very inconvenient.

I don't so much hope that any reader "agrees" with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

A man is known by the books he reads.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus...