I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

It's never really that much fun for me to do movies anyway because you - you know you have to get up very early in the morning and you have to go in and you spend a lot of time waiting around.

I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.

You lie awake at 3 in the morning thinking of story ideas. You're online at 8 a.m. on a Sunday or midnight on a Wednesday. It's a job that you never push aside.

'Old times' never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year and that's better.

I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me 'Good God Vidal what happened to your face?' And I said 'Oh nothing madam I just fell over a hairpin.'

I have never been bored an hour in my life. I get up every morning wondering what new strange glamorous thing is going to happen and it happens at fairly regular intervals.

I am never at my best in the early morning especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells finding its way inside my clothing nipping at my nose and ears.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.

I am so blessed. I've been way over-blessed. At 64 years old I look forward to going to bed every night so I can wake up in the morning and see what blessing is going to come my way that day. Because you never ever know what God's got in store for you.