Try everything; listen to everyone. Follow no one. You are your own story guru!

With the right tools, you can write anything ...

Of all the most devastating sounds in the universe, silence is the most powerful.

I was told, and indeed I saw several examples, that neither time nor place was much minded, and that I might hazard being equally careless of chronology and geography; but I piqued myself on having studied Aristotle, and scrupulously attended to the probabilities of time and place.

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.

To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write.