I escaped the torture of my childhood home by reading. To this day it is still one of my greatest pleasures.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow

I want to know what they look like, their height, and colouring, physique and speech pattens.

There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone's heart.

If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!

I hate being on my best behavior. It brings out the absolute worst in me.

The Labour Party of today has fits of horrors of the very thought of somebody like me might saying that they bought in white Australia. But I believe they did.

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.

What was sleep? A blessing, a respite from life, an echo of death, a demanding nuisance?

Belief doesn't rest on proof or existence...it rests on faith...without faith there is nothing.

That's the purpose of old age... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

You're a kid. I didn't know we taught kids manners anymore.

Writing isn't only about a completed piece of work.It’s about the writer you’re becoming while creating

Ethics reform is about restoring the public trust. When that is in doubt, nothing is more important than restoring it.

I learned a great deal about myself, and it forced me to be introspective in a way that I'm not typically, but "reporting" on my own life became emotionally exhausting.

I thought "RV" stood for "Recreational Vehicle." No! It stands for "Ruins Vacations."

Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with.

We may say we value this thing or that thing more than any other, but the volume of our actions speaks louder than our words.

If you're not spending 80 percent of your time marketing and selling, you are headed for trouble.

With MOOCs, “the real question becomes, where is human intervention important?

I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more or less important.