With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

I can't satisfy myself with just trying to tie all of my imagination into music, especially when music is not appreciated as an art form as much as it used to be.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.

The writer is just so much more intimately involved in the television process than the feature film process.