[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

...I would be the last person to say that madness is not a solution.

A real jiu-jitsu fighter does not go around beating people down. Our defense is made to neutralize aggression.

We're in a society, I think, where everyone thinks it's so cool to work, it's so cool to be online, so cool to be super busy. I think it's super cool not to be busy.

The measure of true giving is to share with someone who has no platform from which to speak and may never benefit us in any way. After all, isn't that what true love is all about?

It's important to think big, but you've got to work small.

There are many ways of communicating. Some hold the theory that new forms of communication between people can be obtained through hallucinogenic drugs.

Awareness means you come with an inner light, you move fully alert. Each step is taken in awareness - the walking, the coming, the sitting - everything is done in full awareness.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a waterboarding, that's what he needs.

The art of work . . . It is going to your work as you go to worship, with a prayer of thankfulness and the aspiration to serve.