...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

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.

What happened to me during the last couple of years of 'The Partridge Family' was I became so famous and so isolated and so unhappy that I had to do anything I could to end it.

If I had one golf course, from a design standpoint, one that I really love, it would probably be Pinehurst. There's a totally tree-lined golf course where trees are not a part of the strategy.

If we're going to have better choices for women, we've got to have better choices for men.

There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

He drew a circle that shut me out- Heretic , rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him In ! From the poem " Outwitted

When people tap into this politics of resentment, it usually ends ugly.

In all successful relationships, the man respects the woman - and it takes a special guy to handle a successful woman. You have to be confident in who you are and what you do.

When men I have dated over the years whined about, ‘Oh, you make no time for me’ – see ya! I just dumped them. I don’t need that pressure in my life.

...a book need never die and should not be killed; books were the immortal part of man.

Well, all I know is what I read in the papers.