Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

So not only can you not imagine dying, you can't really imagine existence before you were born.

What happens is that the system builds many inferior blood vessels in the eye to take the place of the vessels that are dying. And those blood vessels are not up to the task. And they bleed. They hemorrhage and they cover the eye inside with blood.

I don't believe dying's a sad thing.