Most of my life is just spent lying in bed. I mean, it's enough pressure to write the words. Do I need to use the additional energy exerted by sitting up?

Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars.

With publicity comes humiliation.

The older a woman gets, the more invisible you become.

The novel is never really in the first draft. The novel really happens in the revisions.

Whether I'm critically well received, whether or not I sell books - of course it becomes progressively harder to get them published - nevertheless, it's what I do, every day.

Why would I want to read something about somebody that's just a really nice, decent person who overcomes terrible trials? That's not how life is to me.

I feel like I sort of missed the eighties. At the time, we didn’t know we were having fun, which is probably the way it always is.

I was like a social worker for lepers. My clients had a chunk of their body they wanted to give away; for a price I was there to receive it.

I think the sixties must have been quite a lot of fun.

Brownstein's is a fresh and jaunty voice, with a jazz snap all his own.

The sufferings which may be observed nowadays - they are so widespread and so vast - but people speak nevertheless about a certain moral improvement which society has achieved…

There are only two profound ways to reach enlightenment: Laugh by yourself, or get tickled.

The practice of tantra is about inner-transformation. The energy involved in the process of tantric transformation is the energy of our own bliss.

Don't lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations. Expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality.

The folly of all follies is to be love sick for a shadow.

You have to be able to negotiate our trade deals. You have to be able to negotiate, that's right, with Japan, with Saudi Arabia.

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

Our love is our life itself. What our love is like determines how we live and therefore everything about what we are as human beings.

All my films are love stories.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.