Literature is not an instruction manual.

When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.

Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

Adapt and adopt the peer-to-peer and open source models to wider implementation in organisations

You've got to get up every morning with determination if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction.

Mystery is the art of eliciting unseen things hidden in the shadow of natural ones... and serving to demonstrate as real the things that are not.

He was my tormentor and my solace; the creator of the dark and the light within.

I've been singing ever since I was little, but I didn't start taking it seriously until I was about 15 or 16.

I use only essential oils for perfumes.

She groped forward, hands and feet, in search of darkness, distance and solitude.

You know, I've got my hands in 30 or 40 different pots simultaneously and so I have a little bit of all of that where I work.

The image of all the cars leaving pastel-colored people at the same time has never really left me as an anti-ambition for life!