Andrew Davies has said he prefers his authors dead, and I can see there is only a limited usefulness in a live one when it comes to adaptation.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child... It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

I am speaking like a book, but I believe that what I am saying is true.

No one can see very clearly inside the heavy fog, no one but the fog himself!

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk without self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

Just saw a woman with a big tattoo of Jesus on her back. I guess it's an ixnay on the oggy style-day.

All of us black comedians are trying to be mainstream, but you don't want to lose the edge.

The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.

Can you row?" the Sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting-needles as she spoke. "Yes, a little--but not on land--and not with needles--" Alice was beginning to say.

Don't Wait! Start on your dreams, your impulses, your longings, your special occasions today. Because this is your moment.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.