In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.

I don't read books to finish them, I read to consume them.

Despair leads to distress.

Laughter is the most powerful weapon against verbal attack anyone can have.

I think everyone needs to be a role model, period.

I've managed to include only enough historical detail to give the "flavor" of the time period while keeping the characters and story focal.

We must be authors of the history of our age.

Let me guess: you're secretly a wizard who was raised by muggles.

I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone's imagination.