As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate.

Work, which is considered an expression of a person’s value, also becomes a part of one’s spirituality and achieves the higher aim of the Supreme Good

Anytime I'm on the field and my teammates are on the field with me, I just want them to have fun.

Envy not greatness: for thou mak'st thereby Thyself the worse, and so the distance greater.

If you pursue an evenhanded policy between a cat and a mouse, do you help the mouse to survive - or allow the cat to eat half the mouse?

My brother Mark still lives in the house we grew up in.

Just as the light of the sun attracts a healthy eye, so through love knowledge of God naturally draws to itself a pure intellect.

Those who live in the best cliffs think they are better than us. That is always man's attitude when he has power.

From my perspective, 'postmodernism' merely names an interesting set of developments in the social order that is based on the presumption that God does not matter.

One only needs to see a smile in a white crape bonnet in order to enter the palace of dreams.