A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
You can feel bad. . . I mean, that's not illegal.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
Time is how you spend your love.
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
I believe in both a creative and personal God, a divinely ordered universe, that man has an innate moral sense, and that Jesus was a great moral teacher, perhaps the greatest the world has witnessed.
You really expose yourself when you try and go to up the volume and up the size of your performance.
The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter, and is about as ample at one season as at another. It is as well for cheerfulness as for warmth and dryness.
Usually, I start thinking about my next novel soon after completing the latest, and it can take anywhere from a month to 6 months to come up with a story.