The novelist is more a marathon runner than long-distance runner and the kind of courage it takes working in such isolation cannot be underestimated. I really respect my fellow writers on this front.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.

Humiliation scars deeper than the lash.

Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.

The worst enemy is one whose doctrines are founded in hate and are thus beyond debate.

Intelligence is power it is the flame behind the spark of intrigue. Find out all the facts and stamp out the fire. Demystify.

You must appreciate that love is the last reason for which a man marries.

No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy.

Be bad, and if you can't be bad be worse.

To be desired by those who are themselves highly desirable is in itself an aphrodisiac.

So many of man's actions appear to have no immediate consequence but, concealed, do their work until finally all catches up and forms a complex web of cause and effect.

Everything flows from God, but we are limited by imposing our human perceptions upon him. Man designs God according to his own image and the image man has of himself is flawed.

Two bones fell down my chimney and into the bedroom this morning. Hysterical thing to happen to a thriller writer. Murderous ravens perhaps?

We cannot choose the times we live in. Just as, sometimes, we cannot choose whom we love.

Love wasn't a piece of music you could play over and over again with different interpretations. It actually needed to be improvised as you went along.

This may be the very nature of love, a passion as fickle as the sea, full of certainty when the object of desire is absent, yet dubious when confronted again with the lover's presence.

Living is a hazardous profession.

A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.