In The Touch the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.

I've studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique that teaches you how to focus. It's mainly about daydreaming. And the technique's really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene.

The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting they're dressing the scene they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Sometimes a scene may be about one thing and it may end up still being about that but the emotionality of it comes from somewhere else or the humor of it comes from somewhere else and it gives it that real-life quality.

I love making movies and hope to write my own screenplay someday and do some producing and be behind-the-scenes as well.

It's possible that I've matured as a writer and I hope I've matured emotionally but I always find myself revisiting these adolescent scenes.

I really like having a life outside work. I sometimes wish I did more career stuff and was in that Hollywood scene a bit more. But Toronto's my home.

There are times when I'm driving home after a day's shooting thinking to myself That scene would've been so much better if I had written it out.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.