I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

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.

There's a great deal of power in pretending.

A degenerate nobleman or one that is proud of his birth is like a turnip. There is nothing good of him but that which is underground.

Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated.

The little reed, bending to the force of the wind, soon stood upright again when the storm had passed over.

We teach what we need to learn.

Being traded is like celebrating your 100th birthday. It might not be the happiest occasion in the world, but consider the alternative.

Lightly armed nations can move toward war just as easily as those which are armed to the teeth, and they will do so if the usual causes of war are not removed.

I'm really demanding. No girl really wants just a guy. You want a prince, you want Jesus. So when he comes around and his name is, like, Steve, what are you supposed to do?

You can't be what you can't see.

If you really feel hatred for someone, and kind of send it their way, then it’s out of your system and in their hands. I always think it’s therapeutic.