[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.

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.

If you think you can kiss her, you probably could have ten minutes ago.

I'm stone, nothing touches me-nothing.

Stop!" he yelled at the others. "Multigrain fighting is not allowed!

Sometimes when you're in the storm, it's harder and maybe when it's over, then you can look back on it.

My favourite plant is the foxglove. I think they are a perfect balance between being a garden plant and a wild plant, as at home in woodland as they are in a city.

With the Internet, if you erase something it just means you have to spend another half-minute to find it.

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.

Things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within.

When you live guided by intuition rather than thought, your life dances like writing on water, fresh and untraceable.

To my mind [ Jonathan Edwards] is an interesting figure because he is both a canonical Reformed thinker, and yet also someone that pushed the envelope in a number of key areas of theology.