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.

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

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.

Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

Whatever my individual desires were to be free I was not alone. There were others who felt the same way.

If you do not sow into God, you cannot expect a financial harvest.

Yeah, it's risky, but no more risky than driving a car.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

People are angry and dispirited about government because of a failure to do something about crime.

The more we tune into our own frequency of love, the more love will spread.

Because we [people] have an intellect, part of what we do is try to understand the "intelligent design." Everything we don't know is "intelligent design." Everything we do know is science.

Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act -- act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.

Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.