All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden...until the past few years.

I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.

All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.

Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.

The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.

I always try to travel light.

He trailed through hallways, ducking under arms no longer there, excusing himself as he pressed through conversations long since ended.

I knew I loved youwhen 'home' went from being a placeto being a person.

I am like the she-wolf / I broke with the pack / I fled to the mountains / Growing tired of the flatlands.

I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

If you are poor, avoid wine as a costly luxury; if you are rich, shun it as a fatal indulgence. Stick to plain water.

I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to be anywhere. I'm not kidding.

It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.

Though magical communities believe in the God and the Goddess - the equally balanced male and female sides of Spirit - they also believe this equality brings wholeness and creates the One.

The attempt to make the consumption of beer criminal is as silly and as futile as if you passed a law to send a man to jail for eating cucumber salad.