Don't write poems to make girls like you, because it will not make them like you but it will give them something to quote back at you later in life.

I'm a plotter. A thinker, a note-maker, a mapper and a flow-charter. I'm up for using any device that will teach me more about the people I'm writing about and their story.

I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.

The precept "Know yourself " was not solely intended to obviate the pride of mankind but likewise that we might understand our own worth.

I like a lot of sports. Especially football - it's my favourite sport. My uncle played football in Barcelona for nine years and played for Spain in three World Cups.

That married couples can live together day after day is a miracle that the Vatican has overlooked.

Hope & curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees. The unknown was always so attractive to me...and still is.

But success and failure are of no account. They are God's concern, not mine.

Housework hassles go on, are never resolved, and will probably extend into the afterlife ('Why am I the one who takes the clouds to the dry cleaners?').

So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.

Just met a boy, just met a boy when he could become my little problem.

Dessert doesn't count if you eat under an assumed identity.