Modern morality is all about perception.

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Time spent on the knees in prayer will do more to remedy heart strain and nerve worry than anything else.

In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.

Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.

There is an answer, some day we will know And you will ask her, why she had to go We live and die, we laugh and we cry You must take away the pain Before you can begin to live again

Fix yourself upon the wealthy. In a word, take this for a golden rule through life: Never, never have a friend that is poorer than yourself.

To me, the model of success is not linear. Success is completing the full circle of yourself.

TV show is always challenging. It's challenging when you have all of the time and money in the world, and it's more challenging when you have less money.

The day Apollo 11 landed, I knew men would walk on Mars in my lifetime. I'm no longer nearly so sure. The last budget put forward in Canada contained not a penny for Mars.

One of the many hazards of socializing with vampires. It makes you smell bad. A minor hazard, comparatively.

When true friends meet in adverse hour; 'Tis like a sunbeam through a shower. A watery way an instant seen, The darkly closing clouds between.