God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

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.

Leaders scan the future so it can be free of doubts and fear. They do so by not living a double standard life in the present.

When the world is so complicated, the simple gift of friendship is within all of our hands.

The test of a man is: does he bear apples? Does he bear fruit?

I'm the most underdog underdog there is.

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

Moderation multiplies pleasures, and increases pleasure.

As an artist, you're always trying to reach a new height, do something new, try something you haven't done before, and push your boundaries.

The desire to succeed has a lot less compulsion than the fear of failure.

I wouldn't go in a fast food outlet even to use the toilet.