When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Gratitude is continuous stream of goodness.

The past is already documented and the present is taking shape with every moment, but the future is always in-view.

He (Newt Gingrich as a freshman congressman) was both passionate about his goals and coldly analytical in his means.

You have to pay the price - but if you do you can only win.

I regret not starting to paint earlier...It is one of the few things I do regret.

Hermione: You! You foul, loathsome, evil little cocroach! Ron: Hermione, no! He's no worth it.

I had the idea of a boy who was a wizard and didn't yet know what he was. I never sat down and wondered, "What shall I write about next?". It just came, fully formed.

Of all deadly sins, this is the most deadly, namely, that any one should think he is not guilty of a damnable and deadly sin before God.

The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.