When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

Yet, the man never goes slow! Feted against all the odds.How? Nobody knows.Undeterred, unabated, yet uncharted he goes...

I demolish my bridges behind me...then there is no choice but to move forward

Persistence is a necessary ingredient for success.

One of the biggest stories in all of politics worldwide, in all of politics in this country, for decades is what's happened with the Republican Party.

Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?

You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.

There's always male roles I want to play. I'm so annoyed when I watch movies and go, "That could have been played by a woman."

Life without literature is a life reduced to penury.

Home has always been one of the most important things. If I don't feel at home in my space, then I feel really unmoored.