There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Time is how you spend your love.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

Tucker: "But she gave me the perfect gift."Clara: "What?"Tucker: "You.

I firmly believe in prayer. It is possible to reach out and tap the unseen power which gives strength and anchor in time of need.

If there is one thing I hope my books do always and forever, its that they honor working people.

Woman: the peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch and the sinner his justification.

I've always heard music in my head since I was a little kid, so I've always played towards that. If I felt bad, that's what I did.

When you're born with a tail, you learn to go through doors fast.

As you get older, you have more and more layers of experience to forgive, more layers of heartbreak, more layers of what you might think of as failure.

It matters only that you manifest your genius; it doesn’t matter when. It’s never too late or too early.

All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.

You can't have a church run by people who don't believe in God.