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.

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.

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.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

I think so, ' said Professor McGonagall dryly, 'we teachers are rather good at magic, you know.

In my mind, I never doubted whether I was going to achieve what I wanted to do. I just had to decide what it is I wanted to do.

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.

Giving alms is only a virtuous deed when you give money that you yourself worked to get.

I was always taught as a kid that if there's anything you want in life, you've got to work towards it. I guess that sort of stayed with me, really.

States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.

An Adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties.

Nigeria has its problems, nobody denies that, but there is a surge of spiritual, I would say, Christian dynamics that are awesome.

Don't go to the same studio twice, or work with the same engineer twice.