Not everyone believed in marriage then. To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too - that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.

I preferred to look at the sea, which said nothing and never made you feel alone.

They’d scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms—not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating.

He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.

There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.

They love me like a pack of wolves.Ernest

The cake had been done by a lady friend of Mary's. It was simpler than it would have been had she been given more time

Profitability. Growth. Quality. Exceeding customer expectations. These are not examples of values. These are examples of corporate strategies being sold to you as values.

I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.

There's people that get a chance to do the kind of work that changes the world, and make things really different. And there's the kind that just keeps the world from falling apart.

Sensation is an element of what I do, and why not? It's not sensational for the sake of being sensational, but it's sensational art... It's like touching skin.

They told me I wouldn't make 25. Then it was 35, then 45. These were my doctors speaking - they're all dead now.

No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion.

Some believers are faithful in the way that they live, but at the end of the day, they will not share the gospel with as many people as someone else who has special gifts from God.

I was a barmaid for my mum for years, as we lived above a pub. I still can't hear the Heartbeat theme tune without breaking into a cold sweat, as it used to start at the same time as my shift.

forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums