I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

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.

You will find solution, if you have a passionate, strong desire to breakthrough

Transcendence and transformation of consciousness will create a new reality for humanity—not our economic success.

I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.

Microsoft was founded with a vision of a computer on every desk, and in every home. We've never wavered from that vision.

I'm not fake in any way.

We never talk about gambling around my house.

Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

Life is easier when you can write off others as monsters, demon, as horrible threats that must be hated and feared the thing is you can't do that without becoming them, just a little.

The curse of God must have been on our people when we chose him out of so many noble sons of the South, who would have carried us safely through this Revolution.

I still frequent my parents' house. I go there to escape, back to the bedroom that I grew up in. Just to sit there and feel small.