I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that [Margaret Thatcher] wrecked this country.

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 just did a dramatic love story. Whether it's a cultural phenomenon is not for me to say.

Every action begins with a thought, and if you don't watch what you're thinking, your thoughts will get the best of you.

Before the art of medicine comes the art of belief.

We have set out to promote the work of community and faith-based charities. Government cannot be replaced by charities, but it can welcome them as partners instead of resenting them as rivals.

I think as Christians, we all have the same calling, and that calling is to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul and love others as ourselves and to glorify God in everything that we do.

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception.

I'm a designer, and for me, things are always evolving, and such evolution is necessary.

Freud also said we choose our own neuroses. Capitalism is the neurosis of humanity.

But I can tell - let truth be told - That love will change in growing old; Though day by day is nought to see, So delicate his motions be.

If we all could sound like we wanted to, we'd all sound like George Jones.