Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)

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.

It’s sad when friends become enemies. But what’s even worse is when they become strangers.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

Everybody's entitled to think whatever they want and to express that, but my personal day-to-day experience does not come into contact with any of those people.

Laughing at ones own attempt at humor while saying things just come to me should be punishable by death.

Referee Norlinger is outstanding in the sense that he stands out.

You can't mobilize people and connect with them authentically when they can't see the true you.

No free energy device will ever be allowed to reach the market.

I grew up doing stage work as a child and as a teenager, so the stage is my home where I feel most comfortable.

The truth is, I don't really have a type of girl.

If anything, I have witnessed the ways my art travels, or is rendered more accessible, when sanctioned by or connected to white artists.