Places are extremely important when writing a long story because place shapes a character.

Most people don't understand that being in the public eye is emotionally exhausting. It takes a lot out of you.

In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.

I've loved all of my time here.

Writing is only the frosting on my cake. Im whole without it.

There are no rules. Just follow your heart.

The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.

I'm doing a collaborative project with another artist, Mary Hamill. My project is to gather the oral history of war widows, starting with the women of my village, Kop Nymit.

Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

When you rest in presence and pure awareness, sometimes everything is experienced as love because you're connected with all that is, and love is simply the nature of being.

You have the choice to be here as a speck of creation or as the very source of creation. Not exploring such a phenomenal possibility is a crime.

I have always been fully persuaded that, through co-operation, labor could become its own employer.

Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements.

I write what I see and whatever inspires me. The energy the earth gives me, what's on my mind, or what's in my heart becomes part of the lyrical content.

I have a driver in London because I am slightly dyslexic and cannot drive in the U.K.; after all, the traffic runs the opposite way to that in the United States.