I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

The purpose of our life is to help others through it.

Anyone who thinks they can save the world is both wrong and dangerous

Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?

If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.

Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.

The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.

How could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching?

Be light, light, light - full of light!

I believe that life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.

Boredom is fear's patience. Fear doesn't want to exaggerate. Only on occasion--and fear considers this very important--does it want to know how things stand with me.

A book is the only true land of the free: within its borders, anything is possible

I want to work as hard as I can. But I also want six kids! It takes a lot of courage as an actor to take time off for family. But family is everything.

I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar.

And reputation bleeds in ev'ry word.

Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world.

Leeds is a great club and it's been my home for years, even though I live in Middlesborough.

The path to success used to be up and through an organization. Now the path to success is increasingly through self-promotion.

When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.