After all, what's good enough for Austen ought to be good enough for anyone.

Naturally curly hair is a curse, and don't ever let anyone tell you different.

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.

I think you learn more if you're laughing at the same time.

The first rule of snooping is to come at it sideways.

Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

one year as his wife, and id have become one of those abject, quaking women who look at their husbands when someone asks them a question. I've always despised that type, but I see how it happens now

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art - be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music - enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.

When you become aggressive in arguments, you force the other person to become defensive which means they’ll either get ready to fight you or ready to flee from you.

You know your heart and soul are stapled to that manuscript, but what we see are the words on the paper

Making the best of things is a damn poor way of dealing with them. My life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.

Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful.

I'm basically a gift-giver.

A film is the reflection of the soul of its creator.

There does not exist a man sufficiently intelligent never to be tiresome.

Enlightenment, the old teachers say, adds nothing, except maybe the recognition of a need for and a commitment to the work that still needs to be done.

Truth cannot be sacrificed at the altar of pretended tolerance. Real tolerance is deference to all ideas, not indifference to the truth.

Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface