I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long peri…

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.

Song ideas have come to me in the middle of interviews, in the shower, or while I'm writing another song.

Ideas come from the earth. They come from every human experience that you've either witnessed, or have heard about, translated into your brain, in your own sen…