Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

When life gives you the gift of a great story, to not partake in the telling of that story would be a crime against humanity.

A full mind is more valuable than a full bank account.

For he will doAs he do doAnd there's no doing anything about it!

Where there is no justice there can be no secure peace.

The nurse knocked softly on the door of the examining room and wheeled in a shiny silver tray displaying neatly arranged instruments of torture.

It wasn't that I got pinned against my locker, but I was intensely aware that the things I valued weren't shared by anyone. Girls didn't like me, and I had few friends.

The ultimate reason for meditating is to transform ourselves in order to be better able to transform the world.

It opens our eyes to many quite weird possibilities about disease that most medical scientists, tending to be unaware of current evolutionary thought, don't think of.

I can't imagine ever not making music, making albums, writing songs, doing shows. That's all I really know, and that's all I really do.

What you really want for yourself is always trying to break through, just as a cooling breeze flows through an open window on a hot day. Your part is to open the windows of your mind.