The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.

I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence.

I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.

I'm the author of my own misery.

I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

Without curiosity a writer is dead.

People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.

I can be patient, Vivienne, and I believe you’re worth waiting for.

To you character is a psychosis. Integrity is a complex.

Luck implies an absolute absence of any principle.

Guns do kill. Unlike cars, that is all they do.

I thought highly of myself growing up. I still do. There's not really much somebody can say to me to bring down my confidence or anything.

If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It's the ethic my mother brought me up with.

Think of yourself as an insensitive, nitpicking, irritable fool to use the product.

I wrote 'The Zombie Survival Guide' because I wanted to read it, and nobody else was writing it. All I've been doing with everything I've written is answering questions that I had.

Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?