Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world

My growth as a human being has been directly proportional to my growth as a marital artist.

... and all we knew about her that we didn't know the night before was that she had eyes like pansies and skin like the moon.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.

You are going to have bad days and have good days.

This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we're arrogant and soften us when we are unkind.

India has the most technically ambitious and innovative nuclear energy program in the world.

Good friends help you to find important things when you have lost them... your smile, your hope, and your courage.