The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

He who climbs a cliff may die on the cliff, so what? Always a risk-taker by nature, now I became one by intent.

In a still hot morning, the tide went out and didn't come back in. This was not a spectacular event. The sea did not roll up like a scroll, like the sky in Revelations. It quietly withdrew.

Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.

[a]nd the Pig Man came in from Waitomo and swore that if Louisa didn't marry him he'd damn well vote Labour at the next ele

And when he got home he started on Mumma. He hated her then, because in her fatness and untidiness and drabness she reminded him of what he himself was when he was sober.

What has being a girl to do with anything if a person in properly qualified?' ... 'It's what you call prejudice, ' she said.

Then she said, with piteous defiance, "If I could love her, the Good Lord could, and he won't be too hard on an old lady who didn't have an easy life.

It's not doing what is right that's hard for a President. It's knowing what is right.

We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.

Only in mathematics and physics was I, through self-study, far beyond the school curriculum, and also with regard to philosophy as it was taught in the school curriculum.

I get embarrassed listening to my last CDs. I've got a lot of work to do, let's put it that way.

My fan fiction is canon.

I get letters from little girls begging me to adopt them.

Love is the symbol of eternity.

There are times when product is more important than people and sometimes the people are more important than the product.

There is a difference between listening and waiting for your turn to speak.

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation.