It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

I think writers are very anxious.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

You can not buy or drug or dream your way out of pain.

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.

In some of the middle colonies the towns and counties were both active and had a relation with each other which was the forerunner of the present system of local government in the Western States.

I don't like anything new.

I think that teachers have the hardest job in the world, and they are the most unsung heroes so much of the time.

To not think of dying, is to not think of living.

The teacher does best, not when he explains, but when he impels his pupils to seek themselves the explanation.

There's a Chaplain who never visited the front.

I crammed my exams in London and did fine.

That all may be so, but when I begin to exercise that power I am not conscious of the power, but only of the limitations imposed on me.