History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

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'm sorry I hurt your hand...with my face."-Bobby Pendragon

It doesn't matter who said it, as long as it changed you.

All my happiness seems caught up in one of your smiles. - Jered Mandeville, 'Upon a Wicked Time

Huysmans takes the old trope of moon-as-woman and replaces its romantic connotations with decadent ones: the moon here is woman as clamorous lunatic, as convulsive epileptic.

I believe truly that Satan cannot endure it and so slips out of the room - more or less - when there is a true song.

Where nature is sovereign, there is no need of austerity and self-denial.

The heavy spacesuits are spectacular to look at but very hot. Putting one on was like going from chilly London winter weather to the Bahamas in just minutes.

What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?

Those who have lost an infant are never, in a way, without an infant.

A new child in the house is a huge tourist attraction. It's like Disneyland, except there the lines are longer and no one brings casseroles.