Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

A real diamond is never perfect.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

History is full of examples of slaughter and victory.

Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.

I look really good in a scuba suit.

Live with your lips pressed against your fears, kissing your fears, neither pulling back nor aggressively violating them.

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

You can't spell 'developer' without 'devel.'

I do swear a lot, but the advantage is that having played abroad, I can choose a different language from the referee's.

Let your heart be the anchor and the beat of your song.

I'm 40 and I just got my first beauty campaign with Clairol Nice and Easy.

Unfortunately, inner feelings and potential are often stunted by our parents, relatives or peers.