I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."

As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

This is all you need in life: a computer, a camera, and a cat.

So we must lay it down that the association which is a state exists not for the purpose of living together but for the sake of noble actions.

My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

If someone offers you a breath mint, accept it.

Anger is a violent act, envy a constant habit - no one can be always angry, but he may be always envious.

At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice.

If you love Senegal so much, why don't you play for them?

There are always, of course, job losses of a cyclical nature in a recession.