For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

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.

He whom many fear, has himself many to fear.

Much of your success in life is determined by how you choose to act in spite of how you feel.

I lived in London for eight years and I like to say that I am two parts American and one part British because I lived there for a third of my life

Social man lives constantly outside himself.

It was a great thrill just to know Roy Orbison, so to play, sing, write hit songs with him and have him in The Traveling Wilburys was beyond my wildest dreams!

Not wanting to disappoint is what pushed me to be successful.

I identify who I am by who I am.

My background is Scottish.

You’re monopolizing the bride,” Emmett said, coming up behind Edward’s shoulder. “Let me dance with my little sister. This could be my last chance to make her blush.

Poetry, like sanctity, is the orchestration of multiple attributes into vast, compelling wholes.