The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women.

Do you want to live in a world where things are possible or one where they aren't?

And in this quiet moment, as I close my eyes, spent and sated, I think I'm in the eye of the storm. And in spite of all he's said and what he hasn't said, I don't think I have ever been so happy.

Success is the only motivational factor that a boy with character needs.

There is only one word to describe football and that is 'if only'.

There is no room on the golf course for anger or self-pity.

A Drop of the Ocean is still the Ocean.

The worship of safety emasculates greatness.

Most people have thought of ... climate change as a problem about the environment that is separate and distinct from problems of human wellbeing.

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.