Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.

So often the truth is told with hate and lies are told with love.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours, ' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

Iron till it be thoroughly heated is incapable to be wrought; so God sees good to cast some men into the furnace of affliction, and then beats them on His anvil into what frame He desires.

Don't just write a to-do list write a to-be list.

I won’t snatch, harm, or scare to death people with you or use checking up on you as an excuse to cause trouble. You’re worse than my mother, Rachel.” “Mine, too,” Jenks muttered.

For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa.

art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.

Similar thing until today, with digital cameras you look after something like that as robust as they can be.