Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

The best way to vanquish your enemies on the Internet? Ignore them.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

My uncle always said, ‘Hurry slowly.’ I guess, it means, have the intensity of love but don’t rush into it. Have the full feeling but take it slow. Ease into it.

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.

Truth is always a delusion.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

There's a part of bohemia I love. The lack of prejudice, the lack of aggression, I love the lack, for the most part, of competitiveness. It's more peaceful.

I don't think I've changed anything, but I hope that by my talks I have encouraged people in their practice. That's as much as any of us can do.