One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

Idleness does drive me crazy but I'd rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it.

Among the letters my readers write me there is a certain category which is continuously growing and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about all technology in my life. My first typewriter in particular. I had a helluva time putting new ribbon on it.

The things I write are for those who are willing to accept a new relationship between the reader and the author.

My wife Jill and I have an incredibly close working relationship and an incredibly happy married one. We met through work. I was the world's worst advertising copywriter. She had the misfortune to be my account director so from the very start she was my boss and she still is.

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

If my career continues along its current arc people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor even when they don't mean to.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

I've discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way.

I think I wanted to write a book about the relationship between the victim and perpetrator in which the victim agrees to remain silent.

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry whether it's the writer or the spy.

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it as an artist you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material and that's a creepy thing to do.

I like to write with people I have a relationship with otherwise it's kind of scary and you hold back because you don't want to pour your guts out to someone you never met.

I can see how a relationship with a writer would be an easy thing.

If one could be friendly with women what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar is the test of their power.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say 'Can he name a kitten?'

It's the writers' job to make it positive. It's my job to make it real.

If someone's going to talk about me I'd want it to be positively. The way many write you'd think only bad things were interesting. If we don't think positive what's the use? It's a lot more fun you know.

Since I can barely write two books a year the best solution seems to be co-author projects. My goal isn't to get another writer to clone me... it's more to produce a book that shares my vision of positive fun entertainment.

The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.