I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

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.

Most of us make decisions without thinking about their impact on our future.

It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

~ Not every poem is meant for oral stimulation, some are better devoured mentally.

She had the feeling, the tingling, lingering sense that something or someone life altering was just over the horizon. She had no idea what it was, but she wanted to rush headlong to bring it to her.

The malaria parasite has been killing children and sapping the strength of whole populations for tens of thousands of years. It is impossible to calculate the harm malaria has done to the world.

We are more often frightened than hurt and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

That's the van? It looks like a rotting banana." This was undeniable - Eric had painted the van a neon shade of yellow, and it was blotched with dings and rust like splotches of decay.

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.

If I don't go to the gym and work out, I look like a bag of bones. I go three times a week usually and it's nearly all weights work to help with definition.