History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past

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.

History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

You aren't ugly, my dear. Do not listen to anyone who would say so, even yourself.

Happiness is overrated and money can't justify it.

If you're in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.

I have always believed that good is only beauty put into practice.

The first money I have been offered was as District Officer Ba.

It's a place where I could do something on a weekly basis and see if I like it.

The trouble with learning to parent on the job is that your child is the teacher.

America is a country obsessed with appearance. It's a country obsessed with looks.