There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

It is this spirit of godliness that will bring forth the attributes, the principles and the life style of godliness.

Promises hold no real value, What matters the most is not to loose yourself while fulfilling promises for others.

I forgive myself for having believed for so long that... I was never good enough to have get be what I wanted.

Not everyone can be an orphan.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.

Wicked me obey from fear; good men,from love.

Other nations use 'force' we Britons alone use 'Might'.

I've been shucked and gone to heaven.

If consumers make better choices, the marketplace will change.

Nothing's really changed since the Harry Potter films came along.