Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually fiction is just better.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.

I hope I will get to novelize my present circumstances at some point. I have some great stories to tell.

Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.

I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.

One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

I was very disciplined when home - lights out for the girls at 9:00, two hours of writing for me. It was murder on my marriage.

History - the non-fiction version - must inform the fiction to make it truthful; too much of it and your genres are colliding.

It was as if the rare joy that had formed in my heart was replaced by a pale shadow threatening to engulf me at that very moment. Victory didn’t matter now. She did!

What you call love on your side may be called lust on another's side.

A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman.

Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.

Only those who have felt the knife can understand the wound, only the jeweller knows the nature of the jewel.

Riches do not consist in the possession of treasures, but in the use made of them.

People don't want to hear the truth, they never do. They wanna live in some kind of fantasy. And then when they get caught up in it, they start being in denial because they don't want to be wrong.

What, nephew, said the king, is the wind in that door?

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.