[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.

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.

Do not thou hasten above the most Highest: for thy haste is in vain to be above him, for thou hast much exceeded.

His foe was folly and his weapon wit.

Women can't forgive failure.

Nothing is important save the spiritual state that enables one to subjectify one's thoughts to a sensation and to think only of the sensation, all the while searching to express it.

Prussia is great because her people are intelligent. They know the alphabet. The alphabet is conquering the world.

The knowledge of the omnipresence of God also means respect for the lives even of those who may be called opponents.

It's a little bit in the genes because my brother is a journalist and my father was a sports writer.

However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.

I think the US and the UK are gradually growing closer together in a lot of ways. They're inextricably linked.

I went to Texas a few times for gigs and adopted the cowboy look. Every man, at some point in his life, goes through a cowboy stage - everyone! Well, at least everyone that I look up to!