Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Time is how you spend your love.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

We own the things that claim that we are theirs.

Integrity is the soul of leadership! Trust is the engine of leadership!

Hitting "like" on a social media platform is the modern day version of clapping at the end of a performance.

Prudence approaches, conscience accuses.

There is nothing more frightful than an active ignorance. [Ger., Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine thatige Unwissenheit.]

Who are they to judge us, simply because our hair is long?

I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

[People in 1600s] didn't have many books. They would have been staggered by the personal libraries we have today, because books back then were incredibly expensive.

What kind of an idiotic question is that?