It's what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

I have a friend who calls me the queen of the nightmares because I've always had really bad nightmares. I keep a notebook by the side of my bed, so I'll wake up in the night from a bad dream, and my...

My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print!

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer...

My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.

When you experience bereavement at a youngish age, you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board.

Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies.

Ah, the intractable Canadian problem: Winter and finery are basically incompatible.

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.

I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

I don't even think I was quite a year old. My mother was maybe seven months pregnant with my little brother. I was pulled out of her arms, and she landed 75 yards away from our trailer and had a...

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could...

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

I've met some of the most interesting, dimensional, and kind people of my life in that subculture and around the sport. And it seems to me that boxing is one of those structures that is designed to...

Knowledge is not just the preserve of the educated elite. Just because someone has not had a formal education, that does not mean he does not have wisdom and common sense.

When you are a strong woman, you will attract trouble. When a man feels threatened, there is always trouble.

In the wake of 9/11, my wife Trish and I were stranded on the East Coast. We had planned a vacation to Greece, but flights had been halted. Instead, we ended up on a tiny island off the coast of...

Write something beautiful and honest and that makes you very proud.

Bermuda is not even tropical. The charm of the tropics - the heat, the chaos - is not there.

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...

It connects with the theologians' point that you can say what God is not, but not (easily) what He is.

Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.

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.

Taste is one of the five senses, and the man who tells us with priggish pride that he does not care what he eats is merely boasting of his sad deficiency: he might as well be proud of being deaf or...

Policymakers can draw much from 'The Need for Roots': such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory...

Knowing how to tactfully criticize someone's work is a mentor's job.

I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.