Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

You see, one of the best things about reading is that you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

Man cannot live by incompetence alone.

For years I had my hair parted down the middle in a ponytail, tucked down around the sides Well, I went and cut the bangs, and I've been wearing them ever since. They say it's my trademark.

Modern man drives a mortgaged car over a bond-financed highway on credit-card gas.

He's got a thing for Alex Riley.

I really love printmaking. It’s like a mystery and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in.

Keep in mind, when you hit rock bottom, there ain't nowhere to go but up, baby.

My mother would tell me that the shortest cut to purification after the unholy touch was to cancel the touch by touching any Mussalman passing by.