You learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, and suddenly there's this other world that isn't your family or your school or your friends. It's something else.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.

I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence.

I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.

I'm the author of my own misery.

I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

Without curiosity a writer is dead.

Music made me kinder. Music made me a lover.

Ironically, we often fail to see that whenever we compromise ourselves to please others, we tend to lose their respect.

Faith is the best ingredient for miracles.

One of the many troubles of growing older is that it gets progressively harder to find a famous historical figure who hadn't yet amounted to anything by the time he was your age.

They left Puonvangi at the 303rd in the company of a riotous party of Binlisi conventioneers. The Birilisi were an avian species and much given to excessive narcoticism

The ofspring of those that are very young, or very old, lasts not.

The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.

I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.

Technology is the gene uncorked.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?