A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be "taught" - is disturbing.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

The Greeks who knew everything understood that without the orgy there is no middle ground between bedlam and Toronto ... we need the healing grace of the orgy in this country.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.

Those who have suffered are best able to help those who are suffering.

The maester smiled...Hush now, child, I'm much older than you. I can....die as I please.

I just go with the flow, I follow the yellow brick road. I don't know where it's going to lead me, but I follow it.

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it.

The settled will of the Scottish people.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

Whoever strives to withdraw from obedience, withdraws from grace.