Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

Success is never so interesting as struggle

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

The end is nothing; the road is all.

Once you take the cat out of the bag, you can't cram it back in.

I want to be a good man, a good writer.""Be one or the other, Ernest, not both.

I like the notion of guiding, because I can offer advice through my own experiences, tastes and beliefs. But it's all in that individual's hands.

To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be “reached out to” in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

Our nation is turning into an idiocracy.

The older I get, the less I negotiate. When you first start out, it's 90 percent negotiation and 10 percent suggestion. When you get to a certain point, those figures reverse.

There are so many films now where you know the story is a supporting role to the visual effects.

Resourcefulnes s is the cure to failure. Successful people are resourceful and find a way to make it work.

Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police.