I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Honesty is the best policy. But insanity is a hell of a lot more effective in court. So your set, McMullen

Which only goes to show that the best of us must sometimes eat our words, ' Dumbledore went on, smiling.

Buy not what you want but what you have need of what you do not want is dear at a farthing.

If you fire people, you fire customers.

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

With fear of stating the obvious: Freedom belongs to 'We the People,' not 'They the Politicians.'

Communists should set an example in study; at all times they should be pupils of the masses as well as their teachers.

A big producer can survive price fluctuations on the world market. A small farmer can't.

There is no man in this world without some manner of tribulation or anguish, though he be king or pope.

Sure the jews killed jesus, but the guy was an awful carpenter