[Margaret Thatcher] is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for "Who's Who," didn't include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent editions, I do not know.

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.

Surely it is the right wish that draws us to the right place. Nothing of importance happens accidentally in our life.

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

Try not to catch a girl when she's not in a great mood, tired or distracted.

I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your President by your ballots, so I ask you to confirm me with your prayers.

I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me.

It (the heart) is supposed in popular language, to be the seat sometimes, of courage, sometimes of affection, sometimes of honesty, or baseness.

The best part of being married is, everything we face in life, we face as a team. I don't do a thing - professionally or personally - without discussing it with my wife.

Christianity offers the only viable, reasonable, definitive answer to the questions of Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? Does life have any meaningful purpose?

One hundred percent of the time, no plea bargain, no bail, you're going to the penitentiary - that will change the atmosphere in this culture of violence the president talks about.