I gave myself to my children. It happens to some women.

I just knew I would be a writer. It just seemed the only sensible thing to do.

Somewhere inside we do know everything about ourselves. There is no real forgetting. Perhaps we know somewhere, too, about all there is to come.

I think the most dangerous influence for a young writer is to be treated with cynicism or discouragement.

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

Laywers, I suppose, were children once.

All my life I have felt events to be the result of my own sins.

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

The worst battle you'll have to fight is between what you know and how you feel.

Some people do not like you

We've always been a band who's taken forever to do things. After writing 'Persona' I think we wrote about four songs in three years!

It is not children only that one feeds with fairy tales.

There's no particular class of photograph that I think is any better than any other class. I'm always and forever looking for the image that has spirit! I don't give a damn how it got made.

I'm having too good of a time.

Savory...that's a swell word. And Basil and Betel. Capsicum. Curry. All great. But Relish, now, Relish with a capital R. No argument, that' the best.

[Debt] It has driven thousands to drink, and the worry and anxiety it has created have literally taken the lives of many of our ablest men. It has prostrated individuals, enterprises and nations.

She looked, and a scarlet butterfly flew away from her, away down the length of the tower, and then another, another, an unraveling scarf of butterflies like winged blood.