Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago.

No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.

It's oneiric, a beautiful, formless sequence of silver nitrate shadows, and when it ends I wonder what happened, and then I begin to rebuild it in my head

We have an obligation to make things beautiful, to not leave the world uglier than we found it.

Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.

You can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river.

Without stories, we are incomplete.

Books are really places, make no mistake about that.

God created all things. It's men who decide which ones are mistakes.

It takes a long time to learn how to do something simple.

Her capacity for love overshadows the stars, lightening crackles malevolently in the wake of her wrath and for all the tangled mess woman brings to man, in her glory, she is the divine Goddess.

I take every day as it comes and if I have to be somewhere, I'll be there.

I've come through things that would have felled an ox. That fills me with optimism, not just for myself but for our particular species.

Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword.

You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion.

When one has a crisis of faith it means one is struck by the realisation than one has been pretending know things that one doesn't know.

One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds