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.

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.

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.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Everybody always resolves to start exercising, but they never do. You know why ? Because it's January. Who wants to go jogging in the freezing cold ?

To have a grievance is to have a purpose in life. It not infrequently happens that those who hunger for hope give their allegiance to him who offers them a grievance.

Honor is infinitely more valuable than positions of honor.

The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.

Nothing is as good as it seems and nothing is as bad, but somewhere between reality falls.

All people have the common desire to be elevated in honour, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing it.

Nothing personal, it's just business

Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tobagie" as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world.

That's pretty much what every scene is about, getting people to see your point of view. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

I get a lot of stuff from Germany - stuffed bugs and tarantulas.