So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

The mobilisation which Bush has been able to perform since 11 September 2001 has to be fought - at least by Americans - in the name of a wise, honourable and democratic patriotism.

Music was my oxygen. It's what saved me from being a really lonely and scared teenager.

The more your mind is restful, the more you're capable of dynamic activity.

Jane Austen is the feminine Peter Pan of letters. She never grew up.

[Cuban coffee is] very powerful, very sweet, and a little dangerous - just like the people who drink it.

For a kid who's lost his mom and all the rage and grief that no one was able to talk out of me, football was a very therapeutic sport. Very.

We should be leading, and we’re not. We need to get serious about broadband, we need to get serious about competition, we need to get serious about our country.

Good nature is the cheapest commodity in the world, and love is the only thing that will pay ten percent to both borrower and lender.

I really do think everybody can sing.

Wolves and bears, they say, casting their savagery aside, have done like offices of pity.