The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

I dislike Tolkien, another Oxonian Old Norse obsessive, with his war games and made-up language in a world without women.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.

Psychologically, you have to have confidence in yourself and this confidence should be based on fact.

There is an interview given by [ Jean-Paul] Sartre in the USA where he is asked what the future of French literature is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future is [Albert] Camus.

The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies

It's not hard for me to figure out who I like or who my friends are. I trust my energy meter, but I'm also not afraid to let people in who might hurt me.

Who teach the mind its proper face to scan, And hold the faithful mirror up to man.

If a State refused to let religious groups use facilities open to others, then it would demonstrate not neutrality but hostility toward religion.

I've made millions of dollars with the body I have, so where's the pain in that?

It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.