I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

The thought had crossed my mind, that in order to save this world from Hell, I might have to become the Devil.

In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do, " but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.

Fool! You may hate me...But I...I haven't stopped thinking of you for a single day.

I know I'm no Whitney Houston.

Someday we'll all be gone, but lullabies go on and on / They never die, that's how you and I will be

Why is it that even when you're trying your hardest not to get attached, something still sneaks up on you?

Just as God's will is creation and is called 'the world' so His intention is the salvation of men, and it is called 'the Church.'

The state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says, it lies-and whatever it has, it has stolen.

A little thought is sexton to all the world.

The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking.