Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

It’s the inward attention that takes you into the depth of the mind.

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.

A real strong fighter should always look dignified and calm... I believe that any expression of aggression is an expression of weakness.

We could improve worldwide mental health if we acknowledged that parents can make you crazy.

Women never really command until they have given their promise to obey; and they are never in more danger of being made slaves than when the men are at their feet.

I always make it a rule never to look back. Otherwise, I'd ask myself how I could write such piffle and live with myself, day after day.

I've been a musician longer than I've been an actor.

I extract what I consider the best material from different sources. But often the material I perform comes from a very strange location in history, which are minstrel shows.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.