You can change yourself and you can change the situation but you absolutely cannot change other people. Only they can do that.

The world's tragedy is that men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters.

Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference. I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.

I always love writing about children.

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

You can't love a library of e-books. You can't furnish a room with e-books.

I've experienced huge kindness here, a great welcome and some very generous reviews without the snide social edge I often suffer from at home. I'm not patronized here either, which I much appreciate!

You can't help parts of yourself leaking into other characters.

I'm no lyrical stylist, you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.

I am not a fan of the cupcake image. This idea that you can distract a girl with something frivolous like a cake or shoes or handbags, and she won't be a threat to men.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

He called me his 'dream.' I guess now I've become his nightmare.

Nothing fixes a thing so intently in the memory as the wish to forget it

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

We only said goodbye with words I died a hundred time, you go back to her and I go back to black.

The older a fool is, the worse he is.

I could play Arab roles, even German roles, Italian roles because I had that look.

The people I really most admire are Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. If you know someone, it is very hard to revere them.

People crave attention and appreciation more than they do bread.

I wasn't looking out, I was looking in. I knew something was in me, I just wasn't sure how valuable it was.

I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old.