All my life I have felt events to be the result of my own sins.

I just knew I would be a writer. It just seemed the only sensible thing to do.

Somewhere inside we do know everything about ourselves. There is no real forgetting. Perhaps we know somewhere, too, about all there is to come.

I think the most dangerous influence for a young writer is to be treated with cynicism or discouragement.

I gave myself to my children. It happens to some women.

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

Laywers, I suppose, were children once.

Music carries the weight of being human, takes it away so you don't have to think at all, you just have to listen. Music tells every story there is.

If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance

The tongue has no bones, but can break a heart.

idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

[Ronald Reagan] appealed to that group of [working American] people and we can do it again, because they've had, now, eight years of [Barak] Obama. Things have not gone well.

During our lives...we experience so many setbacks, and fight such a hand-to-hand battle with failure, head down in the rain, just trying to stay upright and to have a little hope.

The people of New Orleans have gotten to rock bottom. And the only way out in my mind is for them to really understand it, and then to really choose to get better.

Easy is right. Begin right and you are easy. . . . Easy is right means natural is right, effortlessness is right, egolessness is right.

I love working with kids; I find hope in them.

If you're a black man, they really call you out and have you deal with them.