I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

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.

– I’m going to be a writer, he reminded Milo.– And you won’t need literature?– I’ll write my own.

Magnanimous of you.'His mouth twitched. 'Mmm. Use more words like that, please. Schoolmistress words. Long, impressive ones.' He'd made the last three words sound like an innuendo.

Only out of great vulnerability do you discover what strength you have. Having a daughter who I love with all my being has helped me mine the source of that strength to previously unknown depths.

Academic theology is false.

The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give.

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.

Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.

The worst of all fears is the fear of living