I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.

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.

Sometimes I think gravity may be death in disguise. Other times I think gravity is love, which is why love's only demand is that we fall.

The heartbeat of God burns with longing for the redemption of every individual

Let us together create the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: architecture and sculpture and painting.

Acting in anger and hatred throughout my life, I frequently precipitated what I feared most, the loss of friendships and the need to rely upon the very people I'd abused.

Like a medical procedure,' Ruth said. 'Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.

Its not what happens that counts... It's how you react.

I think each role has had different challenges.

The most important role of a leader is to set a clear direction, be transparent about how to get there and to stay the course.

A lot of praying helped me a lot.

Technically, I'm a knight. My family goes back a thousand years in the Naples area. We're a titled, noble people.