Quotes

Unhappily, I feel I'm probably going to be remembered as "the guy who took over from Fleming" [Ian Fleming]. I'm very grateful to have been selected to keep [James] Bond alive. But I'd much rather be remembered for my own work than I would for Bond.

[on coming up with ideas for his works] I have no idea where plots and characters come from. If you are a professional novelist, a writer of the kind of books that I write, that's the job--inventing characters and plots.

It started when I was eight. I announced that I wanted to be a writer so my father gave me a notebook and some pencils that he'd probably liberated from the school where he was chaplain. I took them up to bed. The story goes that he came up an hour later and found me fast asleep while the notebook was still virgin white except for the first page on which I had written, "The Complete Works of John Gardner".