A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Happiness attracts success. Happy people perform at a much higher level with less burnout, greater productivity, and more resilience. You can't win being unhappy.

Even when life knocks me around, I will not lose hope. For you see, nothing is ever personal Just a chance for me to grow.

Darkness, that is, ignorance, limits our visibility.

Be my God, so I can just be me.

I think he's got good potential, but he needs a lot of work.

Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further.

PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

We would fight not for the political future of a distant city [Danzig], rather for principles whose destruction would ruin the possibility of peace and security for the peoples of the earth.

You cant run a football game in Tiger Stadium without 1,500-1,600 people to help.

To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere.