My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.

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.

The world is going crazy, Karl. And when the world is crazy, a sane man is never okay." from The Berlin Boxing Club

Parenting is difficult under any circumstances, and in my father's view, to raise a morally upright and honest child, you sometimes have to lie to him.

I have very few friends. I have a handful of close friends, and I have my family, and I haven't known life to be any happier.

Our own sorrows seem heavy enough, even when lifted by certain long-term joys. But watching others hurt is the breaker of most any heart.

I answer not, and I return no more.

If I have the courage to acknowledge my limits and embrace them, I can experience enormous freedom. If I lack this courage, I will be imprisoned by them.

In all, we investigated, I think, close to 50 rumors about offers to kill Dr. King around the country. But we found no evidence to support rumors of FBI involvement in the assassination.

A little praise goes a great ways.

The couture client wants the latest things, but she wants the clothes to be super-special - the fabrics won't even touch or go near anything like prêt-à-porter.

The key point to understand is that prosperity is an internal experience, not an external state, and it is an experience that is not tied to having a certain amount of money.