She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."

As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

Faith moves mountains. Religion strip-mines them.

Where your pain is, there your heart lies also.

As God once said, and I think rightly.

It is not until we have passed through the furnace that we are made to know how much dross there is in our composition.

Our relationship with God flows out of our love for God.

I want to be the best in whatever I do.

I grew up like a neglected weed, ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented: every time I saw a white man I was afraid of being carried away.

You love him so much it feels like you can't go on without him. You feel like you might die without him.

Prancing around with marshmallowss on your nipples does *not* constitute living your life fully!

I know too much from personal observation from how the poor and working classes live to be satisfied with a system which makes their lives one unceasing round of toil, deprivation and anxiety.