For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

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.

I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought.I want money. Unless I have it....In my sleep, a natural death!

Any defensiveness is a sign of failure. You can't move forward if you are defensive.

There were about six years when there was not one American who went into space. We shouldn't do that again.

We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

If you spent a proper amount of time with me, you would probably wonder if I was on drugs - I'm not. I'm just incredibly hyperactive and manic. I can be quiet and serious at the same time.

It's odd to think we might have been Sun, moon and stars unto each other; Only I turned down one little street As you went up another.

Determination doesn't make it easier, it makes it possible.

I think I'm going to be making country records for as long as I can see into the future. It's much more down-home and real.

The album for Fiddler really took off. I think it was a combination of John Williams and the score. It was a very classy big album.

Liberty trains for liberty.