Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.

Our technology forces us to live mythically

Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools.

You can't operate a company by fear, because the way to eliminate fear is to avoid criticism. And the way to avoid criticism is to do nothing.

Inspiring passion in children for books, and the world of imagination and creativity fuelled by them, is a fundamental reason for why the Children's Laureate post exists.

When the guns roar, the arts die.

You can predict a person?s future and divine his bank balance if you know two things: the books he reads, the people he associates with.

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.

Never let an old person live in your body.

Favouritism governed kissage, Even as it does in this age.