I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

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 want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.

I've seen women-and men too, sometimes-as canna bear the sound of their own thoughts, and they maybe dinna make such good matches with those who can.

You are the only one that is responsible for loving your life unconditionally, no matter the level of its flaws.

Everyone talks about Spanish influences, but where is it?...Tell me 10 great Spanish restaurants in London....You can’t give me the addresses. Nor in Paris.

I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.

What you'll always get from me is a variety of emotions. Whenever you listen to my CD, whether you're the hardest dude or the bitterest cat, I'll give you a real story to think about.

The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet; the second, an imbecile.

No matter how rich and prosperous, a nation without independence, cannot be subject to any behaviour before the humanity, at a higher level than serving.

Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong.

I believe in the dull lie - make your story boring enough and no one will question it.