I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

As far as dating is concerned, I'm not a casual dating person.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.

Plant no other tree before the vine.

Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.

The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.

Hey, guys!" Grover yelled somewhere above us. "I think she's unconscious!" "Roooaaarrr!" "Maybe not," Grover corrected.

I ask you to write this deeply into your souls . . . the materialistic culture . . . is now on the way to its close.

I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.