The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.

I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men.

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

As every thread of gold is valuable so is every moment of time.

It's so hard being goth. You have to have a bad time everywhere.

As crazy as it sounds, I really think that God just put the reggae thing in me. I can point to a few things in my life that pushed me in that direction.

There can be no doubt that, with the United Kingdom, we will lose a very market-oriented voice.

I never asked anybody to take me seriously.

Every single day that you walk outside your house is something new and different and exciting.

I'd have to say, what inspires me is making sure my siblings have a good role model to look up to.

Sometimes I sits and thinks. Other times I sits and drinks, but mostly I just sits.

I never wanted to be a writer; I just had stories I wanted to share so I learnt how to write and kept going. If I could sing or paint, I would.

Gender-based violence is one of the most pervasive and yet least-recognized human rights abuses in the world.