Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

To create a past that seemed authentic but would be a fiction, you need an invented language.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

What you risk reveals what you value.

Naked is the best disguise.

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.