My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

The world's tragedy is that men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters.

Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference. I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.

You can change yourself and you can change the situation but you absolutely cannot change other people. Only they can do that.

I always love writing about children.

You can't love a library of e-books. You can't furnish a room with e-books.

I've experienced huge kindness here, a great welcome and some very generous reviews without the snide social edge I often suffer from at home. I'm not patronized here either, which I much appreciate!

You can't help parts of yourself leaking into other characters.

I'm no lyrical stylist, you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.

I am not a fan of the cupcake image. This idea that you can distract a girl with something frivolous like a cake or shoes or handbags, and she won't be a threat to men.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

Life summed up with a marketing slogan: Limited Edition!

True greatness is often unrecognized.

I like the religion that teaches liberty, equality and fraternity.

Fullness of knowledge always means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance and that is always conducive to humility and reverence.

Any therapist will tell you that when you're ready, you will come out. To be outed means you weren't ready.

Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.

Also, as a rule of thumb, if you find yourself defending your inalienable right to make someone else feel like garbage, you're on the wrong side of the argument.

Leaders must always put their people before themselves. If you do that, your business will take care of itself.

Get over it - If you have a bad workout or run a bad race, allow yourself exactly 1 hour to stew about it-then move on.