Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. [Margaret Thatcher] takes away the nourishment of the nation.

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.

My favourite part... I guess it's my legs.

It wasn't just one journalist getting it wrong, everybody was getting it wrong.

There are those without decency who must be fought without hesitation, without pity.

There is a time on every job where you say, screw caution. I'm not foolhardy. I'm not stupid. But sometimes you have to be the battering ram.

When I get off a flight, I'm not trying to sit there and let them take pictures of me. I'm tired. I'm scratching my eyes. I just don't like taking pictures in general.

Miss Lynn came around the corner of the row of lockers,glaring daggers. No, daggers would be too delicate a weapon for her.Glaring sledgehammers was probably more appropriate.

It's unfair how the kids who are starving for attention tended to be so annoying that people had no inclination to give it to them.

A surgeon would never hesitate to amputate a rotting hand, no matter how faithfully it had served its owner in the past.

The fortune of war is always doubtful.

Believe in who you are, and trust in what you know is true. Your choices are reflections of the goodness within you.