The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.

Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.

You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.

A great literary work can be completely, completely unpredictable. Which can sometimes make them very hard to read, but it gives them a great originality.

Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.

Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.

In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome.

It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.

I'm not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don't have a mobile. I just don't need things. I don't like things.

A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.

Cinema is incredibly concise.

Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.